How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero | Quanta Magazine

Unlike them, however, our brain does not require so much experience. Quite the contrary, the main nodes of our brain, the modules where our core knowledge is stored, seem to develop largely spontaneously, perhaps purely through internal simulation.

For the bulk of human history, the most learned members of our species have wildly underestimated the human brain’s capabilities. This is understandable, since your brain occupies only about 2 percent of your body mass, and it looks like a blob of gray gelatin. Ancient Egyptians deemed it a useless organ and tugged it out of dead pharaohs through t

The blank-slate assumption is clearly wrong: babies are born with considerable core knowledge, a rich set of universal assumptions about the environment that they will later encounter. Their brain circuits are well organized at birth and give them strong intuitions in all sorts of domains: objects, people, time, space, numbers. . . . Their statisti