Knowledge, therefore, emerges from developmental experience.

Paul Bloom PhD, Cognitive and Developmental Psychology

From all those developmental interactions that I've showed you before.

One is called RELN it's involved in early developmental cues.

Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders.

It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.

In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture.

I'm compiling a developmental profile. She needs more stimulation than that room.

And evolution, therefore, prepared us for this journey with a developmental openness to experience.

And that therefore means that knowlegde is really something that emerges from those developmental interactions.

That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it.

They just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male.

We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge.

And what's so interesting about this is that sometimes, this developmental process can lead to truly remarkable results.

Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime.

This is different from a lot of the developmental work that had been done up to that point.

It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder.

And these chemicals are easily absorbed through amphibians' permeable skin, causing immunosuppression, or a weakened immune system, and developmental deformities.

When you're three, you better be able to write your name legibly, or else we'll consider it a developmental delay.

Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things.

What we are breaking now, is into developmental evolutionary biology, and we are attempting in our lab to retro engineer a

Of course the brain, the human brain, which is where our knowledge is situated, is the repository of all of those developmental interactions.

I have to give you a very, very quick lesson in developmental biology, with apologies to those of you who know some biology.

Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder.

For too long now, children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen.

And what I'd like to suggest is a view that many today in developmental science hold, which is that knowledge comes from development itself.

this is what you did wrong, whereas the language and care and developmental designs is all about self regulation, about acknowledging what you've done.

They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood.

They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior.

And other thing that biology teaches us and that developmental science teaches us is that the DNA that we possess does not code anything but protein.

Number one was asthma, number two was developmental delays, number three was 400 fold increases in rare childhood cancers in the last eight to 10, 15 years.

4 26This is what you did wrong, whereas the language in CARE 4 29and in developmental designs is all about self regulation, 4 33about acknowledging what you've done.

We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives.

Because, by historical coincidence, the turn of the century saw, sort of, the birth of modern intelligence testing as we know it, but in developmental psychology, with children in school.

You have to explain what you're doing and how the developmental events of a tadpole are, of course, very observable and they use the same T3 mediated hormones that we do.

And what developmental science has taught us today is that that elsewhere happens to be the multiple and bidirectional interactions between all of those systems of organization that form the organism.

And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure.

The culmination of this is if you've successfully raised your tadpole, observing the behavioral and developmental events, you will then go and introduce your tadpole to its namesake and discuss the evidence that you've seen.

So, if you think about early developmental activities, we really develop our sense of who we are in the world and our relative safety in the world, before we have cognition, before we have rational thought.

Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others.

So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder, then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved.

Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses.

Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species kind of like caterpillars and butterflies except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.