Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives.

A powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

Alison Gopnik understands babies and children as the R&D division of humanity.

From her cognitive science lab at Berkeley, she investigates the evolutionary paradox of the long human childhood.

When she first trained in philosophy and developmental psychology, the minds of children were treated as blank slates.

But she's led on the frontier helping us see how even the most mundane facts of a three-year-old or a nine-year-old or a teenager from extravagant pretend play to risky rebelliousness tell us what it means to be human.

The creativity of the young human brain, she says, literally helps us all stay creative and growing as a species.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Beeing.

I have a question I generally ask everyone in the interview, whoever they are.

I'm just wondering about the spiritual or religious background of their childhood.

However they understand that now, but it occurs to me you know a word that you are trained as a philosopher that was your first love and I wondered I would kind of add to that.

How would you think about the spiritual or religious or philosophical background of your childhood?

So we were brought up as absolutely militant atheists, militant, serious atheists that was very much the creed in our household and I retained that creed to this day.

But on the other hand, what I like to think of as sort of the numinous rather than the spiritual, the sense of awe and relation to a world that's much bigger than you are, a set of emotions about the significance and meaning of what's going on around you.

Although that whole set of emotions and feelings and beliefs, that was something that was very much part of my childhood.

Essentially I've written about this. Our creed was modernist literature and art.

So we got taken to see the Seagrams building, the way that other kids would have been taken to see a cathedral and we went to see Beckett and Brackett.

In fact we acted in Beckett and Brackett the way that other kids might go to church.

So we had some very intense aesthetic and literary values and I do think those intense aesthetic and literary values are very closely connected to what's often called spiritual values.

And you were the oldest of six children who were born in 11 years. Is that right?

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