The Brain is Too Expensive for Survival Purposes

My interest is in the psychological adaptations that are uniquely human, the 10 percent or so of the brain's capacities that are not shared with other apes. This is where we find puzzling abilities like creative intelligence and complex language that show these great individual differences, these ridiculously high heritabilities, and these absurd wastes of time, energy, and effort. To accept these abilities as legitimate biological adaptations worthy of study, evolutionary psychology must bro...

 Vygotsky's View of Child Learning

Vygotsky saw that adults, and especially parents, were a kind of tool that children used to solve the problem of knowledge. in contrast to our—probably necessary—parental megalomania. Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society. But Vygotsky also thought that...