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August 10, 2012

Strange But True!

Q. Do newborn babies enter the world as virtual blank slates or as little Einsteins, loaded with knowledge about things they've barely even seen?

A. “Helpless as they are, babies pop into the world neurally programmed for reasoning about objects, physical causality, numbers, the biological world, the beliefs and motivations of other individuals, and social interactions,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman in “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.” For example, Baby's brain EXPECTS to see faces, and so Baby will turn toward face-like patterns but not toward scrambled versions of these patterns. By just a few months old, babies will express surprise if one object seems to pass through another, or if solid objects seem to disappear as if by magic. They know to treat supposed animate objects differently from inanimate ones and also make assumptions and draw conclusions about adults, trying to impersonate them when they do something right but not if they make a “whoops-punctuated” mistake. As for babbling, deaf children do this in the same way as the unimpaired, and children hearing radically different languages nevertheless wind up babbling similarly.


 
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