Jean Piaget was a transformational researcher in the field of child developmental psychology. In fact, he is still, to this day, the most cited psychologist in the field.
What exactly did Piaget do? How did he change our understanding of human brain development from infancy to adulthood? Listen to this week’s show, Two Guys on Your Head, and get a familiarization with Piaget and his developments in the field of cognitive development.
Piaget was born in 1896 in Switzerland, and he died in 1980. His background was in biology and he became especially fascinated with studying the psychological development of children.
When we’re born into the world as tiny, helpless infant creatures, our brains are essentially clueless. We had been hanging out in a cozy sack of fluid with all life sustaining nourishment provided prior to birth, then suddenly, we’re jolted into the world, full of different loud sounds, shapes, colors, movement… How does our brain advance from this beginning state of oblivion, to become the complex and remarkable machine that runs our independent adult function state? This question is essentially what Piaget spent his career asking and trying to answer.
He was a very observant guy and he was especially interested in studying the individual and the role of the individual in development, completely independent from circumstantial social influence. Prior to Piaget, the consensus in science at the time was a basic concept that the brain was a blank slate and that children would learn anything you taught them, so circumstances played a significant role in the progress of a child’s intellectual development. Piaget’s theory argued that children constructed their own intelligence, as developing independent individuals, so their circumstances wouldn’t necessarily determine their outcome in cognitive development. By extension, Piaget’s theory suggested that children are responsible for the construction of their own brains through their interaction with the world. That was a huge leap forward in scientific understanding of humans in the world and how we use our minds.
