What an iPad Baby Learns

This baby is indeed of the digital world. She sees the cool things that an iPad does, when she touches it. However, she tries the same thing with a colorful magazine, and it just doesn’t seem to work!

The channel owner writes,

Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person : a baby.

I didn’t think about it that way: Apple, among many others in media and technology, has clearly altered the operating systems (OS) of our brain! Imagine that.

In a way, this is nothing special. Rather, we already know that a baby is virtually a sponge for learning any and many new things. In this process, she formulates certain cognitive schema about the people and the world around her. Which helps her understand, navigate, and interact with additional things she encounters. So in this video, a shiny square-like thing is an iPad schema. This same schema gets triggered, when she sees another shiny squarish thing, like a magazine.

The cool thing about our brain as an OS is that it’s super-adaptable. So now that this baby has seen that not all shiny, squarish things are an iPad, she begins to refine and-or revise her schema. In time, she’ll know the difference between an iPad and a magazine, and a host of many other things in her brave new world!

Moreover, our brain is so super-complicated that no algorithm, device or technology has been able to mimic its amazing functionality.

These latter points are what’s most special to me, as takeaways from this video.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD