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

As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies’ speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture.

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

Studying babies makes us realize that the biological computers on this planet differ from the man-made computers in this regard, as well. They don’t just compute, learn, reason, and know. They are driven to do all these things and are designed to take intense pleasure in doing so.

Children with autism don’t seem to have the fundamental presupposition that they are like other people and other people are like them. This unquestioned first principle, this axiom of our everyday psychology, is, paradoxically, part of what allows most children to go on to discover all the differences between themselves and others.

The question, as always, is how do they do it? The answer, as in the last chapter, is that they are born knowing a great deal, they learn more, and we are designed to teach them.

Two things emerge from all these studies. The adult brain is a highly specialized device that responds specifically to specific kinds of stimulation. Particular parts of the brain, even individual cells, are designed to respond to information from the outside world in particular ways, sending that information off to other parts of the brain. In tha

Piaget wanted to find a link between Kant and the mollusks, between epistemology and biology. His great insight was that studying the development of human children was one way to do this.

So in the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how those objects characteristically move. They know that those objects are part of a three-dimensional space. A

Children won’t take in what you tell them until it makes sense to them. Other people don’t simply shape what children do; parents aren’t the programmers. Instead, they seem designed to provide just the right sort of information at just the right time to help the children reprogram themselves.