What is a Baby Thinking?

As a parent of a one year old, I can relate to this question in more ways then one. A toddler who can hardly keep his attention on one thing for more then a few seconds. One moment he is craving for the new toy in the store, like his life depended on it, and the moment you purchase it, the wrapping of the toy is his new best buddy; the toy just an after-thought. Examples like these abound where baby's are running around from one thing to the next in a matter of minutes. All of this brings us back to the one question: "What is the Baby Thinking?"

In writing a review for Alison Gopnik's new book, The Philosophical Baby, Paul Bloom writes:

Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what's going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it's like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is.