Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 10 of 91
Babies are not blank slates
Babies are highly attuned to these perceptions of safety, though they may not look it. At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up on your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing that babies weren’t thinking about anything at all. Scientists coined the term “tabula rasa”—blank slate—to describe these “empty” creatures. They regarded infants as merely helpless helpings of cute, controllable, human potential. Modern research reveals a radically different point of view. We now know that a baby’s greatest biological preoccupation involves the organ atop their necks. Infants come preloaded with lots of software in their neural hard drives, most of it having to do with learning.