Born knowing: imprinting and the origins of knowledge

Table of Content:

1. What Do Chickens Have to Do with Science?
2. Cambridge, Early 1980s
3. Mothers are not Rolling Stones
4. Baby Chicks and Baby Humans
5. Self-Propelling is Living
6. In the Right Way
7. Upright and Upside DownWhat Fun!
8. Memories of Mother, Left and Right
9. Innate Guides for Learning
10. To Flee or To Freeze
11. Tufted Chickens
12. A Taste for Moderate Exoticism
13. Everything is Not Yet in Its Place
14. Faces in the Clouds
15. A Brain for Animacy
16. Sensitive Periods
17. Very Interesting. But What Is It For?
18. In Ovo
19. The Sound of Neurons
20. Illusion and Reality
21. Completing Partly Occluded Objects
22. Light and Shadow
23. Taking Space
24. What a Chick Would Do Toward Metaphysics
25. Rules and Regularities
26. Arithmetic? Arithmetic is for the Birds
27. ... And Geometry Too
28. The Mental Line of Numbers
29. Closing Time

An expert on the brain argues that the mind is not a blank slate and that much early behaviour is biologically predisposed rather than learned. Why do newborns show a preference for a face (or something that resembles a face) over a nonface-like object? Why do baby chicks prefer a moving object to an inanimate one? Neither baby human nor baby chick has had time to learn to like faces or movement. In Born Knowing, neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara argues that the mind is not a blank slate. Early behaviour is biologically predisposed rather than learned, and this instinctive or innate behaviour, Vallortigara says, is key to understanding the origins of knowledge. Drawing on research carried out in his own laboratory over several decades, Vallortigara explores what the imprinting process in young chicks, paralleled by the cognitive feats of human newborns, reveals about minds at the onset of life. He explains that a preference for faces or representations of something face-like and animate objects--predispositions he calls "life detectors"--Streamlines learning, allowing minds to avoid a confusing multiplicity of objects in the environment, and he considers the possibility that autism spectrum disorders might be linked to a deficit in the preference for the animate. He also demonstrates that animals do not need language to think and that addition and subtraction can be performed without numbers. The origin of knowledge, Vallortigara argues, is the wisdom that humans and animals possess as basic brain equipment, the product of natural history rather than individual development.