It's Friday, November 8th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Chris Mooney.

And I'm Indra Viscontas.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at climatedust.org, and you can follow us on Twitter

at Inquiring Show and on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast.

So, Chris, as you know, this week's show is a little bit different because we actually

recorded the interview live at AT&T Park in San Francisco during the Discovery Days at the Bay Area Science Festival.

Yes, I do, and I was thinking of you while you were doing it.

It was a lot of fun, and we had a great crowd.

And so we spoke to a psychology professor named Alison Gopnik from the University

of California at Berkeley, who has this really interesting thesis that, in fact, we often underestimate

the intelligence of our babies, that they're smarter than we think, and that the way in which

they explore the world is something that we can all learn from.

Let's listen to what she had to say.

We need to have a period, a time in our lives when we can just explore, just learn,

without having to worry about taking the things that we've learned and actually putting them to use.

One way you could think about is that it's like babies and young children

are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are

production and marketing. So we have this time when we have all these grown-ups who are actually

investing in us, taking care of us, looking after our needs, and then in that time we can

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