The Mind Being Built

The board of how a novice becomes an expert. This lesson zooms out from one skill to a whole life: how the mind itself is built in childhood, finished in the teens, and what it trades away and keeps as it ages.

Before you start. Learning & Expertise showed knowledge piling up as chunks, so an expert sees more in the same glance. The Wet Hardware showed a brain that rewires itself as it is used, and How Psychology Knows What It Knows showed why comparing different groups of people is not the same as following one group over time. That last one matters a lot at the end of this lesson.

The idea in 30 seconds

Infant monkeys chose a soft cloth mother over a wire mother that fed them, and used her as a safe base to explore from: comfort, not food, builds the bond.
An infant’s bond with a comforting caregiver, measured by how the baby reacts when the parent returns after a short absence, is mostly secure, and predicts later friendships only modestly.
Babies learn that hidden things keep existing, probably earlier than Piaget’s reaching test showed, though the looking-time evidence for this is contested.
In the teens the pull toward reward matures before the ability to hold back, and friends watching raises risk-taking a little, mainly when they encourage it.
Speed and fresh problem-solving peak early in adult life, while vocabulary and knowledge keep rising into middle age or later.
Comparing young and old people at one moment mixes up ageing with being born in a different generation.

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