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I want you to take a look at this baby.

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What you're drawn to are her eyes
and the skin you love to touch.

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But today I'm going to talk to you
about something you can't see.

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What's going on
up in that little brain of hers.

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The modern tools of neuroscience
are demonstrating to us

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that what's going on up there
is nothing short of rocket science.

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And what we're learning
is going to shed some light

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on what the romantic writers and poets
described as the "celestial openness"

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of the child's mind.

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What we see here is a mother in India,

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and she's speaking Koro,
which is a newly discovered language.

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And she's talking to her baby.

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What this mother --

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and the 800 people who speak
Koro in the world --

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understands is that,
to preserve this language,

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they need to speak it to the babies.

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And therein lies a critical puzzle.

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Why is it that you can't
preserve a language

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by speaking to you and I, to the adults?

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Well, it's got to do with your brain.

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What we see here is that language
has a critical period for learning.

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The way to read this slide is to look
at your age on the horizontal axis.

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(Laughter)

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And you'll see on the vertical
your skill at acquiring a second language.

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The babies and children are geniuses
until they turn seven,

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and then there's a systematic decline.

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After puberty, we fall off the map.

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No scientists dispute this curve,

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but laboratories all over the world

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are trying to figure out
why it works this way.

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Work in my lab is focused on the first
critical period in development,

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and that is the period in which babies

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try to master which sounds
are used in their language.

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We think, by studying
how the sounds are learned,

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we'll have a model
for the rest of language,

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and perhaps for critical periods
that may exist in childhood

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for social, emotional
and cognitive development.

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So we've been studying the babies

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using a technique
that we're using all over the world

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and the sounds of all languages.

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The baby sits on a parent's lap,

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and we train them to turn
their heads when a sound changes --

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like from "ah" to "ee."

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If they do so at the appropriate time,
the black box lights up

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and a panda bear pounds a drum.

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A six-monther adores the task.

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What have we learned?

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Well, babies all over the world

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are what I like to describe
as "citizens of the world."

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They can discriminate
all the sounds of all languages,

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no matter what country we're testing
and what language we're using,

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and that's remarkable
because you and I can't do that.

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We're culture-bound listeners.

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We can discriminate the sounds
of our own language,

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but not those of foreign languages.

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So the question arises:
When do those citizens of the world

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turn into the language-bound
listeners that we are?

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And the answer:
before their first birthdays.

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What you see here is performance
on that head-turn task

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for babies tested in Tokyo
and the United States,

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here in Seattle,

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as they listened to "ra" and "la" --

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sounds important to English,
but not to Japanese.

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So at six to eight months,
the babies are totally equivalent.

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Two months later,
something incredible occurs.

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The babies in the United States
are getting a lot better,

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babies in Japan are getting a lot worse,

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but both of those groups of babies
are preparing for exactly the language

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that they are going to learn.

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So the question is: What's happening
during this critical two-month period?

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This is the critical period
for sound development,

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but what's going on up there?

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So there are two things going on.

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The first is that the babies
are listening intently to us,

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and they're taking statistics
as they listen to us talk --

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they're taking statistics.

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So listen to two mothers
speaking motherese --

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the universal language
we use when we talk to kids --

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first in English and then in Japanese.

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(Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes --

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so pretty and nice.

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(Japanese)

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Patricia Kuhl: So, what I'm telling you

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is that during the production
of speech, when babies listen,

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what they're doing is taking statistics
on the language that they hear.

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And those distributions grow.

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And what we've learned is that babies
are sensitive to the statistics,

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and the statistics of Japanese
and English are very, very different.

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English has a lot of Rs and Ls.

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The distribution shows.

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And the distribution of Japanese
is totally different,

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where we see a group
of intermediate sounds,

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which is known as the Japanese "R."

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So babies absorb
the statistics of the language

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and it changes their brains;

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it changes them
from the citizens of the world

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to the culture-bound
listeners that we are.

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But we as adults are no longer
absorbing those statistics.

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We are governed
by the representations in memory

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that were formed early in development.

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So what we're seeing here

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is changing our models
of what the critical period is about.

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We're arguing from
a mathematical standpoint

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that the learning of language
material may slow down

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when our distributions stabilize.

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It's raising lots of questions
about bilingual people.

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Bilinguals must keep two sets
of statistics in mind at once

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and flip between them,
one after the other,

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depending on who they're speaking to.

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So we asked ourselves,

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can the babies take statistics
on a brand new language?

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And we tested this
by exposing American babies

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who'd never heard a second language

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to Mandarin for the first time
during the critical period.

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We knew that, when monolinguals
were tested in Taipei and Seattle

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on the Mandarin sounds,
they showed the same pattern.

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Six to eight months,
they're totally equivalent.

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Two months later,
something incredible happens.

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But the Taiwanese babies are getting
better, not the American babies.

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What we did was expose American babies,
during this period, to Mandarin.

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It was like having Mandarin relatives
come and visit for a month

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and move into your house
and talk to the babies for 12 sessions.

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Here's what it looked like
in the laboratory.

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(Mandarin)

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PK: So what have we done
to their little brains?

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(Laughter)

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We had to run a control group to make sure

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that coming into the laboratory
didn't improve your Mandarin skills.

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So a group of babies came in
and listened to English.

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And we can see from the graph

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that exposure to English
didn't improve their Mandarin.

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But look at what happened to the babies
exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions.

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They were as good as the babies in Taiwan

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who'd been listening
for 10 and a half months.

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What it demonstrated is that babies
take statistics on a new language.

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Whatever you put in front of them,
they'll take statistics on.

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But we wondered what role

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the human being played
in this learning exercise.

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So we ran another group of babies
in which the kids got the same dosage,

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the same 12 sessions,
but over a television set.

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And another group of babies
who had just audio exposure

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and looked at a teddy bear on the screen.

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What did we do to their brains?

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What you see here is the audio result --

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no learning whatsoever --

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and the video result --

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no learning whatsoever.

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It takes a human being
for babies to take their statistics.

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The social brain is controlling

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when the babies
are taking their statistics.

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We want to get inside the brain
and see this thing happening

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as babies are in front of televisions,
as opposed to in front of human beings.

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Thankfully, we have a new machine,
magnetoencephalography,

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that allows us to do this.

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It looks like a hair dryer from Mars.

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But it's completely safe,
completely noninvasive and silent.

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And babies - we're looking at

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millimeter accuracy

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with regard to spatial
and millisecond accuracy

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using 306 SQUIDs --

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these are superconducting
quantum interference devices --

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to pick up the magnetic fields
that change as we do our thinking.

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We're the first in the world
to record babies in an MEG machine

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while they are learning.

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So this is little Emma.

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She's a six-monther.

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And she's listening to various languages
in the earphones.

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You can see, she can move around.

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We're tracking her head
with little pellets in a cap,

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so she's free to move
completely unconstrained.

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It's a technical tour de force.

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What are we seeing?

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We're seeing the baby brain.

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As the baby hears a word in her language,
the auditory areas light up,

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and then subsequently areas surrounding it
that we think are related to coherence,

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getting the brain coordinated
with its different areas, and causality,

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one brain area
causing another to activate.

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We are embarking on a grand
and golden age.

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We're going to be able
to see a child's brain

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as they experience an emotion,
as they learn to speak and read,

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as they solve a math problem,
as they have an idea.

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And we're going to be able to invent
brain-based interventions

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for children who have difficulty learning.

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Just as the poets and writers described,

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we're going to be able to see, I think,
that wondrous openness,

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utter and complete openness,
of the mind of a child.

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In investigating the child's brain,

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we're going to uncover deep truths
about what it means to be human,

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and in the process,

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we may be able to help keep
our own minds open to learning

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for our entire lives.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)