Dr. Michael Kilgard

How studying the brain informs how we should use our brains.

One idea, as you mentioned, was early language development.

Alison Gopnik and other people have looked into – there's contrasts in sounds that we can't hear.

And so my kids were young.

We said, oh, we should expose them to all those sounds.

There's a company called Baby Einstein and they play Spanish or French.

But we don't really know.

How much of these languages should they be exposed to?

What is the right mix to make them better world citizens, better learners, smarter, more resistant to neurodegenerative disorders or whatever?

We don't know the answer to that.

So we're just running the natural experiment.

I tell everybody that being a neuroscientist is way easier than being a parent.

There's just too many choices.

There's no control group.

There's no way to run it again until you find out the actual answer.

What's interesting was that it turns out exposing people passively, babies passively to the sounds from other languages really doesn't change very much at all because there's no interaction.

So the Chinese tones or the Swedish vowels, these different sounds, um,

When they're not really interacting with you, when they're just on the screen, you don't pick them up, which is really fascinating that your brain already knows that's a TV.

And how does it know that?

It knows it because your interactions with it are so limited.