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

When we look attentively, carefully, and thoughtfully at the things around us, they invariably turn out to be more interesting, more orderly, more complex, more strange, and more wonderful than we would ever have imagined. That’s what happened when Kepler looked carefully at the stars, when Darwin looked at finches, when Marie Curie looked at pitch

Children, in particular, have suffered a grievous decline in just the goods that are most important to them: adult time, energy, and company. The child-rearing work that men and women and an extended family did a hundred years ago, and that women did thirty years ago, has to be done somehow by someone. The scientific moral is not that we need exper

Grandparents and uncles and aunts have also disappeared from children’s lives just when they are most needed, and grandchildren and nieces and nephews have sadly disappeared from our lives. Perhaps we will construct institutions that allow people whose own children have grown up, or who don’t have children, to be involved with other people’s childr

In other words, the brain seems to love to learn from other people.

One of the other surprises of recent studies on the brain’s plasticity is that social factors can dramatically alter how animals learn. As we saw, white-crowned sparrows can typically learn their species’ song from a tape recording between days twenty and fifty. However, this critical period seems less rigid in the right social context. The sparrow

One thing that science tells us is that nature has designed us to teach babies, as much as it has designed babies to learn.

These two interpretations are being hotly debated in the case of language learning. Some scientists believe there is a critical period for language acquisition in humans—a biological clock that cuts off our ability to learn later on. The most dramatic evidence of this comes from the terrible natural experiments that create “wild children,” children

One benefit of knowing the science is a kind of protective skepticism. It should make us deeply suspicious of any enterprise that offers a formula for making babies smarter or teaching them more, from flash cards to Mozart tapes to Better Baby Institutes. Everything we know about babies suggests that these artificial interventions are at best usele

This early research with animals established an important point—a brain can physically expand and contract and change depending on experience.