Articles
| created | title | content |
|---|---|---|
| 2008-12-09 16:34 | What is the mind for? | We have a great brain |
| 2008-12-09 16:32 | It's not all there from the beginning | All the great achievements of humankind, they could not have been achieved by children, let alone by toddlers or babies.
Almost everything that matters for a human has to be learned. And nothing is learned without effort. Watch a baby learning to walk. How many mistakes, how many falls, before he gets it right. Watch a young child learning her mother-tongue. It takes months and years of practice before the first well-formed and complex sentence can be produced. A child's brain is even more able and keen to learn than an adult's. The first imprints will be the ones putting down the first traces of what will become well oiled routes and often travelled neural riverbeds. That is why the formative years are so important. They literally form the brain, trace the pathways of behaviour, thought and feeling. Pathways that - being used again and again - will later become highways. |
| 2008-10-28 21:26 | We are the ultimate learning machine | No other animal is so geared to learning as us humans. It is the very one thing we do best.
It is also the very thing we like best. If something captures our imagination and triggers our motivation, there is no stopping us. We will learn until we can fly to the moon, publish our photos online, do a triple somersault, eradicate small pox or kill our enemy from thousands of miles and hit the target precisely. We learn to behave, to believe, to cooperate, to socialise, to help, to hinder, to judge, to evaluate. We learn to orient ourselves in space and in time. We learn who to trust and how to deal with money. Some better than others. Why? |