Cognition & AI
Math Struggles Aren’t Laziness
Developmental dyscalculia shows why some children struggle with numbers — and how AI models can help us see learning differences more clearly.
Tag: Brain Development
10 articles
Cognition & AI
Brains Improve by Deleting Stuff
Why pruning, compression, and developmental timing matter more than simply adding more — for kids' brains and smarter AI.
Cognition & AI
Your Child Isn’t a Factory Reset
Why children raised in the same home still develop differently — and what epigenetics, critical periods, and AI training can teach parents about individuality.
Cognition & AI
Dopamine Doesn't Care About Your RL Textbook
The brain-runs-on-RL story is elegant, productive, and partially true. But 2025 has four new studies that make the simple version increasingly hard to defend — and the complicated version way more interesting.
Neuroscience & AI
Your Kid Is the Beta Test
AI tools are being deployed in classrooms without ever being tested on children specifically — during the most irreversible windows of brain development. The neuroscience of sensitive periods says we should be much more worried than we are.
Neuroscience & AI
When the System Breaks, the Architecture Shows
Dyscalculia, autism, and dyslexia aren't just clinical categories — they're nature's lesion studies. What atypical development reveals about how minds are built, and what AI's own failure modes might be trying to tell us.
Neuroscience & AI
The Brain Prunes. AI Hoards.
Around age two, you hit peak synaptic density. Then your brain spends the next two decades deleting connections on purpose. AI does the opposite — and that might be exactly the problem.
Ethics & Society
Every Adolescent Is a Fine-Tuning Run
Adolescents forge identity through exploration, uncertainty, and genuine role confusion. AI character is built through RLHF — reward signals, annotator preferences, optimization. The parallel is illuminating. The difference might be everything.
Ethics & Society
Social Learning Built Human Cognition. AI Is Taking Notes.
Children's brains are primed for social learning — joint attention, contingent responses, imitation. AI tutors are now being designed to engage exactly those mechanisms. The science is compelling. The ethical questions are largely unasked.
Neuroscience & AI
The Window Closes: What Critical Periods in Child Development Tell Us About AI's Plasticity Problem
Children have a supercharged window for learning motor skills, language, and movement. Deep neural networks face a strikingly similar problem — and the solutions emerging from neuroscience might hold the key.
