my mind on books

“Babies and the sticky mitten test: how babies of only three months can learn to have a theory of mind” by Alison Gopnik in the Times Literary Supplement (Sept. 3, 2008) reviews Charles Fernyhough’s The Baby in the Mirror and Vasudevi Reddy’s How Infants Know Minds. (The TLS article spells the first author’s name “Ferneyhough” but the book cover shows it as “Fernyhough.”)

Gopnik:

Ferneyhough’s book is a memoir of his daughter’s early childhood, interspersed with information about developmental psychology. Reddy’s book is essentially academic. She explicitly argues that we should reject the idea of an objective developmental science in favour of a more engaged “second-person” approach. Both books provide exceptionally sensitive, careful and thoughtful descriptions of the everyday lives of babies, particularly the authors’ own babies. Reddy’s book is full of eloquent and informative descriptions of the playful way that even young infants tease, act coy, and generally muck about with their parents. Ferneyhough is primarily a novelist, and his book is an elegantly written, warm, thoughtful, novelistic account of his first three years with his daughter Athena.

Childhood is central to many memoirs and novels, but good descriptions of very early childhood, good stories about babies, are surprisingly rare. Perhaps it is because becoming a parent is so emotionally overwhelming that it undermines the detachment that is necessary for either literature or science. Both Reddy and, especially, Ferneyhough do a lovely job of conveying what life with a baby is like. Neither book, however, is very effective at conveying what the science of cognitive development is like.

The article goes on to describe some recent research in cognitive development, including the “sticky mitten test”…