David Eagleman

And you're doing the same thing that goats did 10,000 years ago.

When you drop in as a human, you, in your first several years, essentially get to learn everything that humans have discovered up until now, and then you springboard off the top of that.

And that's what has led to the success of our species.

We've taken over every corner of the planet.

We've gotten off the planet.

We've invented the internet and quantum computation and so on, precisely because we're able, we're not starting from square one every time, but we start from where humans have already gotten.

Yeah, so happily, these examples are rare, but they're very heartbreaking, which is sometimes you find a child who's had such neglect and abuse that they haven't had all the normal input.

So Mother Nature is taking a gamble when she drops a half-baked brain into the world.

She's assuming, okay, well, you should get all the normal language and love and touch and interaction with other humans.

And occasionally, you'll find a child who's locked up by their parents and they're not talked to and...

They have terrible cognitive development.

They just don't develop correctly, as in they can never get language.

They don't even know how to chew.

They can't see very far.

Yeah, it's just a half-baked brain that never gets cooked all the way.

And they have real IQ deficits everywhere.

It turns out there are these things in brain development called critical periods.

And one of those is if you don't get enough exposure to language, lots of language in your first several years, you can never get language at that point.

So often these children are rescued at some point and a whole horde of psychologists move in and give them lots of love and lots of training and language and things like that.

But it turns out it's too late.