Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
30th March 2014
Takao Hensch, a Harvard professor of cellular biology who is part of the Boston Children’s team, has found that behavioral drugs like donepezil can help return the chemistry of the brain to so-called “critical periods” in its development—the times during early childhood when the brain was rapidly growing. Critical periods help explain why children younger than about 7 can pick up new skills, like language and music, much faster than adults can. This is why you see parents attempting to plant foreign languages in their kids while they’re still in Pampers. It’s much easier than trying to conjugate French verbs for the first time when you’re 30.