Babies” Invisible Knowledge
On the surface, what could be more destitute
of knowledge than a newborn?
What could be more reasonable than to think,
as Locke did, that the infant's mind is a “blank
[5] slate” simply waiting for the environment to fillits
empty pages? Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)
strove to drive this point home In his treatise Emile,
or On Education
(1762): “We are born capable of
learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving
[10] nothing.” Almost two centuries later, Alan Turing,
the father of contemporary computer science, took
up the hypothesis: “Presumably the child brain 1s
something like a notebook as one buys 1t from the
stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of
[15] blank sheets.”
We now know that this view 1s dead
wrong—nothing could be further from the truth.
Appearances can be deceiving: despite ts
immaturity, the nascent brain already possesses
[20] considerable knowledge inherited from 1ts long
evolutionary history. For the most part, however,
this knowledge remains invisible, because 1t does
not show 1n babies” primitive behavior. It therefore
took cognitive scientists much ingenuity and
[25] significant methodological advances in order to
expose the vast repertoire of abilities all babies are
born with. Objects, numbers, probabilities, faces,
language: the scope of babies” prior knowledge 1s
extensive.
Adapted fram: DEHAENE, S. How we learn: Why our brain learns better thanany machine... fornow. New York: Viking, 2020, p. 27
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