The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn

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

At birth, infants possess a rich set of core skills and knowledge. Object concepts, number sense, a knack for languages, knowledge of people and their intentions . . . so many brain modules are already present in young children, and these foundational skills will later be recycled in physics, mathematics, language, and philosophy classes.

babies have rich, sophisticated expectations about the world—maybe more than people give them credit for.” Babies, she argues, “use what they already know about the world to motivate or drive further learning, to figure out what they should learn more about.”

even babies a few weeks old are sensitive to magic. They already possess deep intuitions of the physical world and, like all of us, are stunned when their expectations turn out to be false. By