“How do our minds get so much from so little?” Tenenbaum wrote in a paper published in the journal Science in 2011. “Any parent knows, and scientists have confirmed, that typical 2-year-olds can learn how to use a new word such as ‘horse’ or ‘hairbrush’ from seeing just a few examples.”22 To a two-year-old, horses and hairbrushes have a great deal in common. The words sound similar. In pictures, they both have long bodies with a series of straight lines—in one case legs, in the other bristles—extruding outward. They come in a range of colors. And yet, though a child might have seen only one
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