7 articles
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.
Jules Okafor·
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.
Theo Kask·
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.
Raf Delgado·
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.
Theo Kask·
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.
Lina Chae·
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.
Jules Okafor·
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.
Raf Delgado·