Dr. Patricia Kuhl: The power of the social brain has been totally underestimated. It’s a driving force in learning. It’s the gateway to cognition. We have evidence that the social brain is operating to assist learning throughout the lifespan. So let’s think about human babies. We know in the development of language that there’s a very important period between six months and 12 months of age where babies are mastering the sounds of language. So we’ve done experiments in which babies are exposed to a foreign language right at that critical moment.

[Person speaking Mandarin]

Dr. Patricia Kuhl: They’re listening to a Mandarin speaker when they’re growing up in an English family. What we’ve demonstrated is that if a baby at nine months has 12 sessions of play with a live human speaker, they learn so well that they’re statistically equivalent to the babies in the foreign country who’ve been listening for 10 months; however, if the babies are exposed to the same material at the same time, same room, same dosage, but not exposed to a live human being and instead on a beautiful DVD, they stare at it, you think they’re learning, but the brain tests following exposure show that the kids in the machine group learned nothing. The babies in the live group learned so well they matched the babies in the foreign country. So there’s something about being in the presence of another human being and watching the eyes and watching the movements and paying attention to what that person is doing. That social context is extremely important to learning. We can see it in school-aged children who use the social brain when they’re interacting with one another to collaborate, when they’re studying how another person goes at it, when they’re watching the eyes even unconsciously of their study partner to work towards a solution together. In fact, I like to say the social brain gates human learning. That without the motivation and information provided by the social brain, learning just doesn’t take off in the same way that it does when the social brain is engaged.

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