Wonder - Keil, Frank C.

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Résumé :
How we can all be lifelong wonderers: restoring the sense of joy in discovery we felt as children.

From an early age, children pepper adults with questions that ask why and how: Why do balloons float? How do plants grow from seeds? Why do birds have feathers? Young children have a powerful drive to learn about their world, wanting to know not just what something is but also how it got to be that way and how it works. Most adults, on the other hand, have little curiosity about whys and hows; we might unlock a door, for example, or boil an egg, with no idea of what happens to make such a thing possible. How can grown-ups recapture a child's sense of wonder at the world? In this book, Frank Keil describes the cognitive dispositions that set children on their paths of discovery and explains how we can all become lifelong wonderers.

Keil describes recent research on children's minds that reveals an extraordinary set of emerging abilities that underpin their joy of discovery-their need to learn not just the facts but the underlying causal patterns at the very heart of science. This glorious sense of wonder, however, is stifled, beginning in elementary school. Later, with little interest in causal mechanisms, and motivated by intellectual blind spots, as adults we become vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation-ready to believe things that aren't true. Of course, the polymaths among us have retained their sense of wonder, and Keil explains the habits of mind and ways of wondering that allow them-and can enable us-to experience the joy of asking why and how.

Biographie:
Frank C. Keil is Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where he is also a member of the Cognition and Development Lab. He is the author of Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior and other books.
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Sommaire:
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
I The Cognitive Gifts of Childhood 
1 The Puzzle and the Promise 3
2 Early Exploration and Discovery 21
3 Working with Others 43
4 The Mechanistic Mind 73
II The Big Sleep: Weakening Wonder
5 Developmental Disconnects 105
6 Motivational Muddles 137
III Disengagement and Its Discontents 
7 Seductive Detours 169
8 It's a Wonderless Life 195
9 Great Reawakenings 221
Notes 253
Index 295