Michael Pollan

I think you could make a case that young children are more conscious than we are.

Yeah.

And which is a kind of interesting thing that we prune consciousness down the way we're pruning so many things in the brain as we age.

But this idea of lantern versus spotlight consciousness, I found very powerful.

I learned it from Alison Gopnik, who's a child psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley.

And she gave me a lot of good advice as I was embarking on this.

The first was...

Never forget that the kinds of people working on these questions about consciousness are not typical in their consciousness.

These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, read books for a really long time, think out problems.

They have an extreme version of spotlight consciousness, which she calls professor consciousness.

That was very helpful.

She contrasts this with children's consciousness, which she calls lantern consciousness.

So instead of having that one degree of attention focused on some object, they're taking in information from all 360 degrees.

It seems very undisciplined, very unfocused.

You find it when kids get to school.

Some kids can sit there and do it, and a lot of kids can't because they're still taking in information from all these sides.

It's interesting, it allows them to solve problems that adults can't solve.

They think outside the box, they have more divergent thinking.

Then as time goes on, we narrow our focus.

It allows us to get a lot done.