Genius Infant

How does he do it?

You're a genius and you probably didn't even know it. Every human with basic language skills has performed a feat of genius-level magnitude, without any awareness of having done so. The feat is so humdrum, so commonplace and yet so awesome. The feat of which I speak is an infant's learning to speak, by passive observation.

If you have a child in a crib, you may dangle stuffed animals in front of him, or read him nursery rhymes. He'll gain from these experiences, but he has a more influential ‘teacher’. By just passively listening to adult conversations, or listening to a TV in the background, the child's brain will absorb incredible volumes of data that Mother Goose never imagined. Let us consider some speech concepts, from simple to difficult: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, verb tense, conditional phrasing, and function words. Nouns are easy, the ultimate in concreteness. You dangle a puppy over the crib and say, “doggie” – the child can make an easy connection. Not so easy is what’s overheard. The child overhears the father ask the mother, "Janice did you get a chance to take the car in for a brake inspection". The child's brain is parsing the sounds as the father speaks; it can tell “a” and “chance” are two different words. It sorts the words by part of speech at some point.

The mathematics and inference skills required for the above are amazing to me. If you placed the adult me in a crib in Beijing, and all I did was overhear adult conversations, I would be dumb and mute with regards to the Chinese language. I would still be dumb and mute after 10 years of doing that. A child learns fluent speech well before Kindergarten – the ‘wunderkind’ effect is not the result of teachers or nursery rhymes. It’s the result of sitting and listening – and long naps for processing. What I envision is that the brain stores every sentence in some type of giant matrix. The Mother of all multi-linear programs must scan the sentences for common use and for frequently used words. It may even do more incredible things – like storing a picture of the scenario with each stored sentence. For example, the brain will make note of these two vocalizations:
Honey, would you like some more eggs?
These eggs are runny.

The brain will correlate a small, white cooked food item with the word ‘egg’. But the four year old child also has some mastery of verb tense and function words. These are abstract concepts – a P.H.D. in linguistics might struggle explaining these things. A four year old of average intelligence has implicitly and yet passively grasped the concept with no instruction at all. My other guess about this universal precocity is that the brain is somehow pre-wired with some type of “proto” language, already built in – and it is still nonetheless amazing. You might say, “I’ve done nothing brilliant since infancy.” That may be, but embrace the fact that for a fleeting part of early childhood, you had skills of abstraction and correlation that rival Einstein’s. We are geniuses, all.