Michael Mitchell: Archive

Dr. Peterson's interested in interest itself. Can we retrace our thoughts like we do heavenly bodies back to a big bang or whatever? I don't think he's going to like the answer.

I sat with a three-year-old for several hours a day for four months watching YouTube videos. He would point at a thumbnail and I'd click it. It was that simple. I never chose a video for him and we watched the full video about 80% of the time. He only got distracted or anxious when he realized I wasn't watching with him, and it wasn't because the video was irrelevant. He was that good at choosing what he wanted to watch.

It wasn't a scientific experiment. It was merely what he wanted to do most of the time. But the important thing to understand is that he was in control of the task. He had just turned three. He couldn't count or really even speak. The qualities of the videos that interested him the most were not the songs or the words or the visuals. It was the actions and their consequences, cause and effect, the goal-directed behavior of things, which is probably how it appeared to him. It wasn't "what's going to happen next?" that fascinated him. It was how things worked. So it's not surprising really that almost anything held his interest, as long as I helped him understand. He couldn't comprehend a whole story or narrative or whatever, but the events they're made of he found endlessly entertaining, to put it mildly, because we would literally watch videos for hours.

I was focused on his conceptual development. I don't believe we fully know something until we can say it clearly and concisely in the form of a logical proposition, but he obviously demonstrated an implicit grasp of metaphysical concepts, such as "identity" and "causality", and on a level as sophisticated as any adult, most of whom lack an explicit understanding of such concepts as well. He knew, for instance, that objects on the screen were representations of objects in reality, not the objects themselves, which is the fundamental characteristic for the concept "art", and he didn't expect the real objects' behaviors to match the ones he saw in the animations.

For about the first week, I tried to teach him language, to connect what he was watching to words, and he could do it easily, but he simply had no reason to communicate his experience so he understandably didn't care. It actually irritated him. This is when most adults would introduce force or bargaining to achieve the desired result, but I took it as a compliment. He couldn't comprehend language as a tool of thought because he didn't know he was thinking. To him, language was only a means of communication, and we really didn't need to communicate an experience we were sharing. He understood that he needed me to communicate to him, but he also understood that I didn't need him to communicate with me. Distracting him with language skills exercises actually defeated our purpose, the achievement of goals he thought were important to both of us, so I quickly fell in line.