cognitive building blocks, which include such concepts as red, car, and road. Once a set of building blocks like this has been tweaked and refined and thoroughly debugged through experience, says Holland, then it can generally be adapted and recombined to build a great many new concepts—say, "A red Saab by the side of the road." Certainly that's a much more efficient way to create something new than starting all over from scratch. And that fact, in turn, suggests a whole new mechanism for adaptation in general. Instead of moving through that immense space of possibilities step by step, so to
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