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The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies

In March of 2015, Laura Schulz spoke for a TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her subject of discussion: babies. Maybe some would be confused by this, seeing how TED is a foundation all about ideas, innovation and advancement. How could a baby, the very beginning of human life, the kind of person least aware of or concerned with cultural development, relate to any of those pillars? Schulz explains that young children are actually just as involved, if not more so, in growth, understanding and developing minds. It is apparent that children begin to comprehend things at an astonishingly high rate after they are born. However, this TED talk further reveals that babies as young as 15-months are already capable of matching what adult scientists attempt to do each day. That is, babies are fully able to draw plausible conclusions from small amounts of data before they can even speak their own names.

Schulz’s speech was very informative, well organized, and thoroughly supported with evidence. Her body language expressed someone comfortable and genuinely interested in sharing her discoveries. She moved around on the stage and used humor and visual aid to keep her audience captivated. Her ethos was surely established as she explained she worked in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; a position that is impressive and relevant to her discoveries. She was also able to create pathos without much effort. Simply put, her tests involved very cute babies playing with toys. One can imagine the effect of a baby, proving a scientific hypothesis, on a large crowd of very intelligent TED conference attendees. But by far the most impressive aspect of this address was Schulz’s use of logos. By using actual video footage from her tests, the statistics she showed of her results were able to be more easily understood, and verified at the same time. Her data was obviously viable. Her claims of the intellectual ability of young children were logical and strongly supported by evidence.

Overall, this speech was very well made and very effective. Laura Schulz displayed an excellent use of rhetoric, and was able to clearly inform her audience of her impressive findings. Without being manipulative with her words, she was able to prove praiseworthy the minds of even the smallest of humans.
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Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 1, 2017 at 9:24 AM

    Laura must have put a lot of work and research into this. She must really know what she was talking about.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMay 7, 2017 at 4:26 PM

    The concept that babies have the brain capacity as full grown humans is astonishing, yet it makes perfect sense. When a student is at school studying they are not becoming more intelligent, instead they are becoming smarter. Intelligence or the capacity to learn is a genetic trait whereas being smart is the application of the knowledge learned. So children the will become scientists, for example, will only have the same intelligence as there older self and can therefore do similar tasks, however, the have not learned as much yet and so they will become smarter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMay 8, 2017 at 1:52 PM

    This is definitely not what I thought of babies. It is so incredible how amazing our brains are, and how little we understand about them. Your analysis of this speech was very well done, it was clear and I feel as if I watched the video myself.

    ReplyDelete
  4. LexieMay 8, 2017 at 7:17 PM

    This TED talk is really fascinating. Everyone just assumes that babies have no idea what is going on half of the time. I think it is really cool that they are able to understand what is happening and make conclusions about the situation they are in.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMay 9, 2017 at 4:42 PM

    That is incredible! Those little babies have abilities for that before they can speak their own name. very refreshing Sophie!

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousMay 10, 2017 at 6:35 PM

    Sometimes I wish the scientists of today thought more like babies and young children. Instead of nit-picking and manipulating data and results, what if we all just looked at the empirical evidence, understood it, and drew the conclusion that logically followed. There are times that it is not as simple, but often enough we find ways to over-analyze things and make them more suitable to our ideas, resulting in skewed, and even contradictory results between studies.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousMay 10, 2017 at 8:06 PM

    I agree with everything you pointed out about the means of persuasion. It's interesting how she can choose a topic, like you said, people wouldn't normally expect, and made it into something very interesting and reasonable. I also agree with the way she used actual footage to show her evidence. Great job.

    ReplyDelete

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