Recently, my son had a small day surgery at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi. It wasn’t anything major, and the next day, he acted like it never even happened. While we were there, though, I noticed that their logo included a balloon – just like I’ve seen in so many other logos for children’s hospitals. I spent a great deal of time that day thinking about why that might be.
I based my best guess on the children who need the services of these incredible facilities. We were beyond blessed that everything we were doing was very minor, but so many other families are not. So many children visit these hospitals as their last hope of survival, and in so many cases, the situation does not come with an expectation of survival – at least not to adulthood.
Then I thought for a while about why children always seem to be so impressed with balloons. Even the youngest baby tends to fixate on a balloon when you bring one into the room. If there is one thing I’ve learned as a dad, it’s that my son figures things out way before I even think to explain them to him. I think kids are capable of looking around the room and observing that one thing in the room is not behaving like all the other things – specifically the floating balloon.
I decided to do some digging to find out if this crazy notion was my own original idea, but it turns out Renée Baillargeon beat me to it when she developed the “Violation of Expectation” paradigm, which showed that infants as young as 3 to 4 months old demonstrate sensitivity to violations of physical laws. In one study of this idea, researchers rolled a ball behind an object, and in some cases (the “possible”) they let the ball continue on its trajectory, emerging from behind the object as you might expect. In the other group (the “impossible”), they stopped the ball without the baby seeing it and had it appear somewhere else. These researchers found that infants consistently showed longer looking times, indicating surprise or heightened attention, during the “impossible” events compared to the “possible” events. In other words, they caught on when something wasn’t quite right.
That brings us back to balloons. Balloons violate the expectations children set for the world around them, where everything else is held to the ground by gravity. Instead, balloons float, seemingly all on their own, and it takes years before a science teacher explains that helium is lighter than oxygen.
So it turns out that balloons are a perfectly wonderful element of the logo for a children’s hospital where so many children seek to violate the expectations set forth by their diagnosis. But what about us – as adults are we somehow subject to the “Violation of Expectation” paradigm?
Why do you think the whole world is having their minds blown by artificial intelligence right now? (By the way, ChatGPT does not write any of these posts – but the pictures are usually AI-generated.) Many of us have lived our whole lives being told the equipment is only as smart as the operator, and so we have long since expected that all of the real “intelligence” is on the outside of the computer screen. Now we see computers that are thinking, creating, and providing feedback on our work as if they somehow know how to do it better than we do. This violates our expectations of how the world is supposed to work, and that isn’t always a bad thing.
There has never been a better time to re-evaluate the expectations we have for ourselves and the lives that we lead. We live in a world that even has reusable water balloons. Around every corner, there is an opportunity to be surprised, but sometimes that means we have to look for the thing in the room that isn’t doing what we thought it would.