Who Taught You Not to See

You were not born blind to affordances. Infants don't need to be taught to see. They turn toward light. They reach for what's within range. They detect the edge of a surface before they have language for it. Eleanor Gibson proved this in 1960 with the visual cliff experiment. Babies as young as six months old refused to crawl over a drop-off even when their mothers called to them from the other side. They perceived the danger directly. No one taught them to see it. Perception is not something...