The Brain That Changes Itself (11)

They also discovered that there was a "critical period", from the third to the eight week of life, when the newborn kitten's brain had to receive visual stimulation in order to develop normally. In the crucial experiment Hubel and Wiesel sewed shut one eyelid of a kitten during its critical period, so the eye got no visual stimulation. When they opened this shut eye, they found that visual areas in the brain map that normally processed input from the shut eye had failed to develop, leaving the kitten blind in that eye for life. Clearly the brains of kittens during the critical period were plastic, their structure literally shaped by experience.

看来“少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲”还有另外一种解释。学习要趁早不是“推”，而是人的生理基础决定的必然规律。