Intuitive physics?
A lot of people can’t master physics even in high school. Although I got a good grade in it I never felt that it was my strong suit, and I struggled more than I was used to with a lot of its concepts, even though the subject matter interested me.
And I knew better than to even try to take it in college.
But little did I know that babies intuitively understand physics—or at least what these researchers refer to as physics. It’s pretty fascinating, whatever you want to call it:
In a review of related scientific literature from the past 30 years, vanMarle and Susan Hespos of Northwestern University found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months ”“ the earliest age at which testing can occur. At that age, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have an expectation that non-cohesive substances like sand or water are not solid. In a previous publication, vanMarle found that children as young as 10 months consistently choose larger amounts when presented with two different amounts of food substance.
“We believe that infants are born with the ability to form expectations and they use these expectations basically to predict the future,” vanMarle said. “Intuitive physics include skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out. The person doesn’t have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts. The majority of an adult’s everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and we believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behavior of objects and substances with which they interact.”
Well, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising. It makes sense that our brains can process feedback about the world of objects from the start, despite the fact that our early and almost complete dependence on parents means that we can have the luxury of developing our skills over time. I wonder whether the great apes have similar “physics” abilities, or whether they’re limited to humans.
My granddaughter, who is just beginning to stand, often forgets to hold on and seems a little surprised when she falls. I will steer her towards the Humanities…
…have you ever discussed your earliest memory?
At this point, my earliest memories are more like “remembering the memory”.
I can tell you that there is what I call a “crib memory”, that was before I understood words and shapes, but I was soothed by the sound of a familiar voice (my mother’s, I presume) …most shapes were like what-I-later-understood-to-be interesting geometrical constructs.
Yes. Pre-language. Pre-shape familiarity. But post being able to be fascinated by shapes, and post being able to assign “comforting familiarity” to voices & shapes.
…I was very young (pre-kindergarten), when I realized that it was important to me to preserve some of those memories.
…and yeah, in retrospect, precocious as all get out, too.
davisbr: See this.
You can take a puppy that has never been in water, hold him slightly above the water as if about to put him in and he’ll instictively start dog paddling. I think all creatures are born with instincts somehow handed down about how the world works.
TY.
…that is so very cool.
Sorry, this isn’t physics. All it is learning how to navigate the physical world without hurting oneself. I’m surprised that the researchers are surprised. But then again this is social science research (sorry couldn’t resist the snark). I would guess that there is a large probablility of natural selection for those individuals who could do this sort of learning early.
In fact, this sort of learning is what held us all back from truly understanding the actual physics for a few thousand years (Greeks onward) until Newton showed up. Everyone gets very good at doing the things the researchers describe. As a result we naturally think that this must be the way the world operates, which leads to such “natural” conclusions like ‘ a force is needed to maintain a constant speed’.
Now if they could demonstrate that a 10 month old could intuit that actually no force is needed to maintain a constant speed then I would be impressed.
you dont live in the world, you live in the model of the world your brain creates for you and lets you percieve.
if you actually saw the world as your eyes and senses picked it up it would be different
however, as we develop from a baby, we gather information about the world into a machine that is not blank but not all programmed either in details, but more in general meta perspectives.
if we are careful and we put in more real data and more and more of it, the model then embodies more of reality.
done enough, and your self can then plumb your reality to intuit the world.
from the models we have of mind, none of this is possible.. in fact the mind models cant explain in one model how einstein could intuit, how babies know before learning (Given feminist leftist tabula rasa), and how we can hallucinate and so on… like how we can watch something and not see something like a gorrila in the image… or not see a car… or believe in things not there…
all those different things are clues beyond the broken minds studied to make models…
there is only one mind model that fits them all, and thats one that even fits the jewish notion of saving a life you save a world..
we are not blank slates..
we are preprogrammed to a large degree
a better way to put it is that there is no such thing as gathering all information and saving it without some preconception… and our preconceptions as to what to focus on and so on, are preprogrammed to a degree.. sometimes to a degree where it takes great effort not to be subjected to them.
from the god gene that some are thinking of shutting down using a virus (so we as humans stop beleving in god en masse)…
to prader willi which is abrogated by blood father presence… (ie, you dont havce a dad, and your body shifts to eat more and save more thinking that hard times are coming without the helpmeet).
you should see what it looks like to see babies do instant math..
and even at a very early age.. they can often read people and understand intents and things.
for instance… accidently knock something off a table, and the little helpers will try to help and give it to you… throw it away, and they will ignore it…
if you ignore advocacy studies to prove feminism and such, you will find a huge number of studies that show amazing abilities. but they are often clouded with bs stuff as to the ability of chimps vs children… (which ignores the whole to convince the ignorant who assume the development)
our models are corrupted and skewed thanks to the idea that ideology is proved by science authority to move mass material to action
Gravity. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the Law.
….they’re shocked to find out something that’s been basic child development advice to mothers since my mom had babies? Good grief.
My youngest, who is now 29, was slow to vocalize. We were worried that something might be wrong, but at 14 months he pointed to a painting of a horse and said “Horse’s eye.” We were flabbergasted to say the least as he had never before vocalized a single mama or dada. And after that first burst of speech he spewed forth an understanding of the English language that was astounding. By age 3, after having many books read to him, he started reading; and it wasn’t rote memorization. In fact he could read books unknown to him with a 8 year old level of comprehension by the age of 4.
A great deal of thought and synthesis is going on in those young brains. We are an amazing species and we stand on the shoulders of giants.
A reason why children like balloons, especially helium balloons. They don’t do what we expect them to do.
About 20 years ago, I saw a small blimp inside a huge hangar, just floating there. I just laughed. I’ve studied physics; I know how this works. Still, I just laughed.
Not to brag, but my granddaughter, age two months and a half, has figured out that if she kicks in her bouncer seat, the suspened gizmos will move.
So she kicks and watches until they stop, and kicks some more.
Probably the ancestry.
Impressive, but not physics.
Richard A-
my eldest disassembled all the cupboards in our kitchen at about 9 months; impressive since, until that point, I didn’t know it was POSSIBLE. My mom reminded me that when we were toddlers visiting my grandma, she’d give us the “child proof” containers to open for her.
(note: not one-uping, just adding supporting info)
“A reason why children like balloons, especially helium balloons. They don’t do what we expect them to do.”
Wow. Reading that connected with my memories of playing with balloons. It was like that, they were a surprise, an anomaly. Nothing else would bounce or float like that, anything that big should be much heavier.
That’s how beautiful the world was before school and physics destroyed my innocence…
Of course, great apes and even rats have some understanding of basic physics simply because it is not possible to survive without it. Experiments with apes clearly demonstrate their ability to manipulate objects to reach high hanging fruit, for example, or get access to food hidden out of sight in a box with complex lock and need to unlock it to open the box. I would speculate further that an intuitive grasp of physics is better in apes than in humans, and even better in rats than in apes. The less plasticity of psyche there is, the more physics need to be hard-wired in it to survive. We can compensate for weak instincts by education and learning. Animals lack this advantage and so must have better and more complex instincts.
And ability to throw stones into prey (favorite hunting mode of many primates) shows ability to judge the distances and calculate the path of a thrown stone correctly is a sort of physics in which many humans are much inferior in comparison.
>>> he pointed to a painting of a horse and said “Horse’s eye.”
That’s ok for physics, but you’ll know he understand politics when he points to a picture of Obama and says “Horse’s Ass”.
😀
>>> We are an amazing species and we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Don’t worry, modern teachers have a very good practice at chopping the legs out from under those giants and getting the student back down in the dirt where they believe humans belong.
>>> And ability to throw stones into prey (favorite hunting mode of many primates) shows ability to judge the distances and calculate the path of a thrown stone correctly is a sort of physics in which many humans are much inferior in comparison.
OK, where are you getting THIS silliness from…?
Humans are spectacular at this. It’s just that, we don’t need to use it from an early age just to eat any more, so many people in fully civilized places don’t learn it from scratch. It’s kind of like the difference in memory skills of literate-vs-non-literate cultures. The non-literate ones need to learn memory far more extensively than the literate ones, so members of those cultures do them and practice them day after day after day. The literate ones just write crap down. (yes. And then they lose the piece of paper… :^D )
But proto-civilized humans are enormously effective at basic physical concepts — levers, inertia, and so forth. We had techniques for using these things long before the Greeks codified that knowledge and extended it using mathematics.
>>> they are often clouded with bs stuff as to the ability of chimps vs children…
Chimps can learn to do some basic math, but even a 5yo has a deeper basic understanding of how numbers work than the most capable and well-educated chimp. Even if the chimp wasn’t educated in the modern public school system.
Anyone old enough to remember the “New Math” fiasco of the 60s knows that it failed, utterly, and produced the first generation that sucked at math for the most part.
The principles on which it was developed were sound, but the problem was that they depended on teachers being properly taught to understand what they were teaching. As with most government work, the precursor requirements of teaching teachers what they were doing wasn’t done.
“New Math” was based on the notion that integers can be derived from set theory, and so forth. You can build all of mathematics beginning from that point.
The problem is, if you don’t understand what’s going on there, you’ll be hopelessly lost as to what the heck the relevance of this stuff (the set theory) is to mathematics. So you had a vast array of teachers who could not answer the most basic questions of why this stuff was being taught. And if you don’t understand it yourself, you aren’t going to be able to teach it well.
>>> That’s how beautiful the world was before school and physics destroyed my innocence…
foxmarks, trust me, it was entirely the school. physics has so many cool things beyond that that it’s impossible for it to disappoint as to the magic in the world.
For example:
Quantum Levitation
Similar, slightly more clinical but also cool on some levels:
How Superconducting Levitation Works
A girl educated in modern schools explaining the above:
Quantum Levitation
😀
That freakin’ stuff just blows helium balloons away.
Good gawd, I still think in set theory LOL.
(My class was the oldest of the classes they introduced that math to at our school, and it was summer school to boot, and by the next level or so, we were back to “real math”. So little harm done.)
@igotbupkis –
What did you think of the recent story of the chimp who uses fire, cooks, and is apparently teaching same to other compound chimpanzees?
…that one rather stood out to me, at least (granted: I didn’t probe the factuality).
Davisbr-
looks to me like someone trained an ape to do a series of actions.
Whoop, especially when that’s a supporter’s narration. (Imagine my surprise when I was a kid and found out that the famous signing chimp with the kitten just did stuff in random order, they’d only shown clips where she did it in the right order.)
Ah.
…TY.
Set theory is a way too abstract for children imagination. It is not a concidence that it emerged rather recently in 2500 years of history of mathematics. While essentially it has nothing new in substance compared to Aristotelian logic which emerged at the very begining of mathematics, and all Aristotelian syllogisms neatly map onto it and vise versa, it does not come naturally for a child, unlike notion of a number, which does. (See Piaget, “Genesis of Number in Children”.) That is, arithmetics and logic are intuitive, while set theory is not. This was a hige blunder to introduce it in elementary school.
“huge”, of course.
I suppose it depends on your definition of “physics”.
Gravity, for example, has pretty severe and permanent importance. Quantum theory does not, even if you have a quantumer around the house, which most of us do not.
I second physicsguy’s comment and snark. On so many levels, this study is rubbish.
Afterthought. One assertion jumped out at me: “hidden objects do not cease to exist.”
Where to start? First, that’s not physics so much as metaphysics.
Second, and more prosaically, how many pre-schoolers “hide” by covering their faces? Hell, a lot of liberals think that problems they don’t see must not exist, and, conversely, that someone who points out the existence of a hitherto unappreciated problem somehow caused it.