As helpless as Homo sapiens newborns are, their brains are all business. Assaulted by a noisy, smelly, tactile, and, after some weeks, visually vibrant universe of stimuli, infancy is the period when brain development is at its most frenzied, as new neurons bind themselves into synapses to filter meaning from a chaos of sensory stimuli. This process continues all through childhood until early adolescence, by which time children have twice as many synapses as they were born with and brains fired by fantastical, often absurd, imaginations. Basic skills acquired during this period of life are
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