Question: How is your research beneificial to the world? we already know that babies dont see the world like us so what is the point in your research? Why not do something worthwhile like looking at cancer like sarah or stopping global warming??

Caspar Addyman answered on 14 Mar 2011:

Do you know how you see the world? Do you know how you mind works? How did you learn to speak when you were little? You were tiny and you didn’t have any lessons and yet it was much easier than learning French or Spanish in school. And some babies have to learn two, three or more languages simultaneously when they are growing with no trouble at all

Psychology tries to understand how the human mind works. But the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and no-one really knows exactly what all bits do or how they do it.It might not even be possible for us to understand it because our brains might be too small to understand how our brains work! I think that is pretty important to study just to try an understand ourselves better.

But it can also be beneficial to help children with learning difficulties, or with autism or a brain injury. Or to help adults with depression, anxiety, with eating disorders, or Alzheimer’s disease. Why do people form gangs, get it fights or start wars? A lot of the answer comes from psychology.

Why is your personality different from your friends? Is it because of your genes or maybe it is something else about your family life. But then why are you so different from your brothers and sisters? Those are questions from psychology too.

Because we get better and better at life as we get older we take a lot of things for granted that we know how they work when actually we’ve not got very much of an idea at all. I’ve got a vague idea of how a television works and a power station but if you stranded me on a desert island I doubt i could build either of them. But if I never do get stranded then I don’t really notice that I’ve no idea how most of the things in modern life actually work.

The same is true of how ours brain works. Most the time they work so incredibly well that we simply take it for granted. You can read a book or instantly recognise any of your friends but it has taken computer scientists 50 years to get computers to do the same. And they succeeded by copying the human brain. Likewise you can run around, catch a ball, find your way home or hold a conversation all without ever thinking about how you did it.

But if you look at a new born baby it can’t do any of those things. It spends the first few years of it’s life working really really hard to master all things that we do everyday. Walking, talking, being able to tell the difference between cats and dogs. Or being able to know that a sofa, a chair a stool and a beanbag are all the same kind of thing even though they look completely different. Babies have to learn all of that. And in our research we watch them doing it and figure it out.

And as we gradually learn more about those very early first steps in what it is to be a human, we can learn more and more of the complicated things that come later.

So yes I think what i am doing is very important.