Sublime

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

Most often people believe that the “gift” is the ability itself. Yet what feeds it is that constant, endless curiosity and challenge seeking.

Using this trick, psychologists discovered that infants are born with some knowledge of physics and mechanics: they expect that objects will move according to Newton’s laws of motion, and they get startled when psychologists show them scenes that should be physically impossible (such as a toy car seeming to pass through a solid object).

Another scenario that can lead to children losing interest is when curiosity is punished. A child’s appetite for discovery can be ruined by an overly rigid pedagogical strategy.

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.

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 blank-slate assumption is clearly wrong: babies are born with considerable core knowledge, a rich set of universal assumptions about the environment that they will later encounter. Their brain circuits are well organized at birth and give them strong intuitions in all sorts of domains: objects, people, time, space, numbers. . . . Their statisti

In cultivating a mind-set for reflective improvisation,