Sublime

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.

The new developmental research tells us that Baby 0.0 must have some pretty special features. First, it must already have a great deal of knowledge about the world built into its original program. The experiments we will describe show that even newborns already know a great deal about people and objects and language. But more significant, babies an

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

One-year-old babies know that they will see something by looking where other people point; they know what they should do to something by watching what other people do; they know how they should feel about something by seeing how other people feel. The babies can use other people to figure out the world. In a very simple way, these one-year-olds are

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

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

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.