What Is Learning?

Learning is very difficult to define. It is the matter of our minds, and includes thinking, becoming aware, imagining, seeing, hearing, hoping, remembering, abstracting, planning, and problem solving (Malone, 1991). Learning is deep in our species, emerging from our desire to take in new information by actively exploring new territory. Learning is a physical phenomenon, occurring in the sensory systems, as energy from light waves and vibrations in the air is converted into electrical impulses...

 Odd Sympathy

Laid up in bed during a brief illness and idly watching two clocks mounted in one case, Huygens noticed something strange: No matter how the pendulums started out, eventually they always ended up swinging in exactly opposite directions. Huygens wondered whether this odd sympathy might solve the longitude problem. Perhaps, he thought, two such clocks could regulate each other. If one got dirty, for instance, and started running slow, the influence of the other clock would lessen this effect. I...

 Nature VS Nurture in Child Development

When a three-month-old, a one-year-old, and a four-year-old look at the same event, they seem to have very different thoughts about it. They seem to transform the light waves and sound waves into different representations, and they use different rules to manipulate those representations. Children don't have just a single, fixed program that gets from input to output. Instead, they seem to switch spontaneously from using one program to using another, more powerful program. That makes babies an...