The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be.
Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.
Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly.
One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.
What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.
We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
