Re: And yet...

And never mind the fact that a large part of development isn't organic, but is experiential. Our culture attempts to stunt the opportunities of youth, and then blames them for making poor choices in areas they haven't been able to exercise.

I am reminded of people who have been born blind, but whose blindness is, nonetheless, "isolated" in one part of the system and curable by correcting the missing or non-functioning part.

They are the kind of people who are looking at a shape (a triangle, square, circle...) and need to physically count its sides or corners, or touch it, to recognize it as the shape it is. And who get confused by triangles of different angles, or the same ones being turned sideways and upside down.

This doesn't mean they are dumber than a preschooler. This means that the way shapes are imprinted in the brain, from visual input, didn't happen for them. They have the visual experience of an infant - without the plasticity of an infant.

And yes, it can be dangerous - because learning shapes is a prerequisite for learning perspective. Biologically, two eyes are the only thing needed to have perspective. But when an inexperienced brain interprets, say, parallels as converging because they look converging, it also interprets different the danger of an incoming vehicle running in the middle of those parallels...

And yet it all stems from lack of experience - and can be learned "rationally" even after the phase for making it "intuitive" is passed.