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

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

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

The broad lines of the developmental answer to this question should be familiar by now. Babies are born knowing a great deal about language. They also have powerful learning procedures that allow them to add to that knowledge and, in particular, to learn all the details and peculiarities of the language of their own community. Finally, adults play

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

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

Babies are similarly fascinated by causal relations between objects. Babies in the ribbon-and-mobile experiments actually get bored after a while with the spectacle of the mobile moving, but they don’t get bored with the sensation of their own power.

They formulate theories, make and test predictions, seek explanations, do experiments, and revise what they know in the light of new evidence. These abilities are at the core of the success of science. All the social institutions would be useless if individual scientists couldn’t create theories and test them.

And they begin to understand that knowing an object’s category lets you predict specific new things about the object.

Success in science is often a matter of finding the right analogies, and the computer gave us a new one.