Читать книгу The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides - Mariano Sigman - Страница 8

Of all the places we travel throughout our lifetimes, the most extraordinary is certainly the land of childhood: a territory that, looked back on by the adult, becomes a simple, naive, colourful, dreamlike, playful and vulnerable space.

It’s odd. We were all once citizens of that country, yet it is hard to remember and reconstruct it without dusting off photos in which, from a distance, we see ourselves in the third person, as if that child were someone else and not us in a different time.

How did we think and conceive of the world before learning the words to describe it? And, while we are at it, how did we discover those words without a dictionary to define them? How is it possible that before three years of age, in a period of utter immaturity in terms of formal reasoning, we were able to discover the ins and outs of grammar and syntax?

Here we will sketch out that journey, from the day we entered the world to the point where our language and thought resemble what we employ today as adults. The trajectory makes use of diverse vehicles, methods and tools. It intermingles reconstructions of thought from our gazes, gestures and words, along with the minute inspection of the brain that makes us who we are.

We will see that, from the day we are born, we are already able to form abstract, sophisticated representations. Although it sounds far-fetched, babies have notions of mathematics, language, morality, and even scientific and social reasoning. This creates a repertoire of innate intuitions that structure what they will learn – what we all learned – in social, educational and family spaces, over the years of childhood.

We will also discover that cognitive development is not the mere acquisition of new abilities and knowledge. Quite the contrary, it often consists in undoing habits that impede children from demonstrating what they already know. On occasion, and despite it being a counterintuitive idea, the challenge facing children is not acquiring new concepts but rather learning to manage those they already possess.

I have observed that we, as adults, often draw babies poorly because we don’t realize that their body proportions are completely different from ours. Their arms, for example, are barely the size of their heads. Our difficulty in seeing them as they are serves as a morphological metaphor for understanding what is most difficult to sense in the cognitive sphere: babies are not miniature adults.

In general, for simplicity and convenience, we speak of children in the third person, which erroneously assumes a distance, as if we were talking about something that is not us. Since this book’s intention is to travel to the innermost recesses of our brain, this first excursion, to the child we once were, will be in the first person in order to delve into how we thought, felt and represented the world in those days we can no longer recall, simply because that part of our experience has been relegated to oblivion.