Baby Brains

How does Google make cool, novel products like Google Wave that are getting tech writers all over the Internet buzzing?

A big secret is that while other companies treat their programmers like babies from other species, Google treats their programmers like human babies.

Google is well-known for its policy that lets programmers work on their own independent projects for 20% of their work time. In the case of Google Wave, they actually sent two programmers down to Australia and formed what amounted to a startup down under.

But as savvy as Google is to allow this kind of "free time," humans got there first. According to evolutionary scientist Alison Gopnick, interviewed in SEED Magazine, one of the great human advantages is our unique ability to imagine. This ability is fostered by the fact that for the first few years of our lives, we are not weighed down with mundane tasks such as searching for food or running around. Like the Google engineers and programmers who do not have to worry about their "day jobs" for 20% of the time, babies, by being totally taken care of longer than any other species, can learn and imagine more than other species.

Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?
AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

We see this emergent phenonemon play out again and again in the SPAN world in which we live. A lack of planning and an insistence on freedom can give birth to unbelievable structures. These structures will find their own form, but only after years of trial and error -- only after being given the freedom to fail, succeed, and find their own natural balance.