Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

We learned all kinds of things from our parents--manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us science knowledge--even though they may not have known a lot about psychology, physiology, chemistry, physics or animal adaptation. In learning by doing, young children get support for their later formal education: they build a set of experiences that they can recall and relate to new information in middle school science classes and beyond.

Sometimes people complain when trying to learn a new skill: “I’m not that young anymore. It’s harder to learn anything new.” But adult brains may be more pliable than we thought.