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

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.

Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way.

Piaget wanted to explain the classical philosophical problems of knowledge. But unlike earlier philosophers he wanted an explanation that would be linked to biology.

The second important thing about the influence of other people is that the most significant behavior seems almost entirely unintentional. Parents don’t deliberately set out to imitate their babies or to speak motherese; it’s just what comes naturally. Our instinctive behaviors toward babies and babies’ instinctive behaviors toward us combine to ena

Why do we do it? Do we produce motherese simply to get the babies’ attention? (It certainly does that.) Do we do it just to convey affection and comfort? Or does motherese have a more focused purpose? It turns out that motherese is more than just a sweet siren song we use to draw our babies to us. Motherese seems to actually help babies solve the L

We’ll summarize this big picture by elaborating on the three ideas we’ve presented in previous chapters. Foundations. Babies begin by translating information from the world into rich, complex, abstract, coherent representations. Those representations allow babies to interpret their experience in particular ways and to make predictions about new eve

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

Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society.

That means, though, that the brain must be profoundly flexible, sensitive, and plastic, and be deeply influenced by events in the outside world. A handful of genes couldn’t predetermine the billions of specific neural connections that make up an adult brain. And, as we’ll see, the more we learn about the brain, the more flexible, sensitive, and pla