From: Noam Chomsky Sent: Monday, July 11, 2016 12:09 AM To: jeffrey E. Cc: Valeria Chomsky Subject: Re: What is better for thought than e=ht Jewish delicatessen food. Glatt kosher, I hope. Very=interesting experiment. It might tell us a lot about musical genres =nd their underlying structure, and the cognitive capacities that organize =hought, creativity, and experience in these apparently human-specific ways= On blind children, you might want to look at the fascinating=study by Landau and Gleitman on the language of the blind: Language and=Experience: evidence from blind children (or something like that). =AO What is striking is that without visual experience, the blind learn lan=uage virtually in parallel with sighted children, with the same changes th=t plainly have to do with maturation and the very specific internal concep=s of human cognition, leading finally to understanding of extremely refine= visual concepts, all with only minimal experience that can't be direc=ing these developments any more than the nutrition of the embryo, while ob=iously necessary for development, can determine that we have a mammalian r=ther than visual system. There are also some quite intriguing differ=nces. E.g., at the age when sighted children acquire the words/conce=ts see, look at, etc., blind children also do, but necessarily give=a tactile rather than visual interpretation. So for the blind child,=to look at something is to touch it, and to see it is to grasp what it is.=C2 The child is therefore surprised to find that its mother cannot see =he back of the dolls they are holding, since the child can. Lots of =esults like these. What is particularly striking, however, is=how similar the cognitive growth is to normal physical growth, of course e=icited by experience but then substantially following its internally deter=ined path. The widely-held belief that cognitive development is some=ow different from the rest of biology in that it is experience-det