Sublime

of our minds, ignorance is gradually erased as our brain successfully formulates increasingly accurate theories of the outside world through observations.

But what machines cannot yet do well, and that the human brain succeeds in doing wonderfully, is integrate new information within an existing network of knowledge.

Many neuroscientists are empiricists: together, with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), they presume that the brain simply draws its

the likely physiological basis of our ancestors’ first reading of tokens was a tiny new circuitry connecting the angular gyrus region with a few nearby visual areas and if Dehaene is correct, a few parietal areas involved in numeracy and occipital-temporal areas involved in object recognition

three pillars of learning and quickly learned to read. He actively engaged in reading, with curiosity and enthusiasm. He learned to pay attention to every letter of every word, from left to right. And, over the months, as his errors receded, he began to accurately decipher the correspondence between letters and sounds and to store the spellings of

Consolidation, which renders what we have learned fully automated and involves sleep as a key component. Far from being unique

“combinatorial explosion”—the exponential increase that occurs when you combine even a small number of possibilities.

The first is that repeated practice reduces the mental effort to perform tasks.

blueprints to the terrain (the environment).