The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there – not to mention the ‘Baby Einstein’ DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys – won’t do a thing to make your baby smarter. That’s largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways.
We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness – better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.
Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.