

How Surprises Help Infants Learn - mparramon
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/babies-learn-through-being-surprised/389420/?single_page=true

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deckiedan
I know my son (10 months) _loves_ being surprised. Today he was playing with
magnets - finding them sticking to the fridge rather than falling to the floor
when he let go of them put him in fits of giggles and kept him occupied for
about 10 minutes.

Playing peek-a-boo and then showing up wearing a silly costume or face
expression or whatever is one of his favourite games.

When he first met a water fountain, a balloon, bubbles, etc. Anything that
didn't respond as he expected physical things to respond, he absolutely loves
it, and becomes totally fascinated by them for ages and ages.

Being a dad is awesome. Sleep deprivation, getting puked, peed, and pooped
over, changing nappies (diapers), getting screamed at irrationally for hours,
etc. is awful at times (and coping with it while sleep deprived makes it all
so much worse), but totally worth it.

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Jun8
One difficulty with the hypothesis that babies are born with pre-existing
knowledge about the physical world is the question about where this
information comes from and how it is coded in the brain. Could it be that the
initial physical rule s are random, similar to the Uncarved Block Hacker Koan,
inspired by an exchange between Sussman and Minsky (),
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan)?
Or is the information somehow coded in the connection of neurons in the brain
through evolution?

It seems to me that the role of evolution-derived innate world knowledge is
relatively small to the mechanism of a powerful rule generation and update
scheme, based on probabilistic analysis done in the brain's network. It could
be that the rules are pseudo-randomly generated and _this_ is innate knowledge
that we use.

Here's the interesting thing: As more researchers see the power of such rule-
update learning (e.g. see also this 2002 paper by Renee Baillergeon from UIC,
PDF file:
[http://fitelson.org/woodward/baillargeon.pdf](http://fitelson.org/woodward/baillargeon.pdf))
I think the weight of Chomskian hypothesis of (in simple terms) "innate
language faculty since language is too hard to learn" is decreasing. I found
this review of Daniel L. Everett's book _Language: The Cultural Tool_ by John
McWhorter explaining this point vey well
([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/language-
the-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/language-the-cultural-
tool-by-daniel-l-everett.html)).

You might also find this TED Talk by Alison Gopnik on how babies think
interesting
([http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think/...](http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think/transcript?language=en))

~~~
_0ffh
My personal favourite hypothesis for language learning can be reused for this:

There /is/ some pre-coded information about these problem domains in the
brain. It just /isn't/ coded explicitly, but implicitly as a bias of the
corresponding learning faculty.

Even hard things can be easy to learn, if the learning mechanism itself is
properly biased.

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rwbhn
Reminds me of my son's 1st encounter with a balloon. He was in a phase where
he liked to drop everything on the floor. We were at a restaurant and he was
given a balloon. The look on his face when he "dropped" it was priceless.

