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.
Tag: Critical Periods
8 articles
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.
Cognition & AI
Your Brain Wasn't Built to Read
Reading is an evolutionary hack — no brain region was born for it, and no child learns it without years of effortful, phonologically grounded work. LLMs never had to do any of that. The difference turns out to matter enormously.
Embodied Cognition & AI
Babies Learn to See. Cameras Never Had To.
A newborn's vision is 30x worse than a camera's. But two years later, the baby is doing something the camera will never do — actually understanding what it's looking at. Here's what visual development reveals about the gap between biological and artificial vision.
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.
Neuroscience & AI
Born Pre-loaded
Babies know more than they should. AI knows less than it seems. The nativism-empiricism debate — is the mind born equipped or built from scratch? — turns out to be the organizing fault line of both developmental neuroscience and modern AI architecture.
Ethics & Society
Whose Language Does the AI Tutor Speak?
Bilingual children develop metalinguistic superpowers by navigating two languages. AI systems can "speak" hundreds — and understand none the way humans do. The question isn't just neuroscience. It's about whose languages we're choosing to build into our systems, and what we're telling children when we don't.
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.