An award-winning cognitive scientist offers a counterintuitive guide to cultivating imagination.

Imagination is commonly thought to be the special province of youth—the natural companion of free play and the unrestrained vistas of childhood. Then come the deadening routines and stifling regimentation of the adult world, dulling our imaginative powers. In fact, Andrew Shtulman argues, the opposite is true. Imagination is not something we inherit at birth, nor does it diminish with age. Instead, imagination grows as we do, through education and reflection.

The science of cognitive development shows that young children are wired to be imitators. When confronted with novel challenges, they struggle to think outside the box, and their creativity is rigidly constrained by what they deem probable, typical, or normal. Of course, children love to “play pretend,” but they are far more likely to simulate real life than to invent fantasy worlds of their own. And they generally prefer the mundane and the tried-and-true to the fanciful or the whimsical.

Children’s imaginations are not yet fully formed because they necessarily lack knowledge, and it is precisely knowledge of what is real that provides a foundation for contemplating what might be possible. The more we know, the farther our imaginations can roam. As Learning to Imagine demonstrates, the key to expanding the imagination is not forgetting what you know but learning something new. By building upon the examples of creative minds across diverse fields, from mathematics to religion, we can consciously develop our capacities for innovation and imagination at any age.

Who is the learning-disabled child? As theories multiply and research accumulates, this pressing question persists, leaving parents and educators and, particularly, students at a loss. The Learning-Disabled Child does much toward providing an answer. A broad-based account of what is currently known and done about learning disabilities, the book gets at the roots of this perplexing problem—in the law, in the school system, and in the child—and offers a new outlook for its treatment.

Since the 1970s, millions of children have been misclassified by public schools as learning-disabled, while many others with true learning disabilities go unidentified and unhelped, as case material presented here makes poignantly clear. Over the same period, research on the nature of learning disabilities, based on samples of misclassified children, has yielded a cloudy and confusing picture. Drawing on her own background in cognitive, developmental, and abnormal psychology, as well as her research into reading and dyslexia, Sylvia Farnham-Diggory cuts through the confusion surrounding learning disabilities. She describes advanced research and clinical data that elucidate handicaps in reading, writing, spelling, drawing, calculation, remembering, and problem-solving. In addition, she outlines a straightforward assessment procedure that would reduce the misclassification of learning-disabled children and, if adopted by schools and private diagnostic services, would save the nation billions of misspent dollars.

Prescriptive as well as descriptive, The Learning-Disabled Child offers invaluable advice to parents seeking the best methods of diagnostic evaluation, and to teachers in search of the most effective means of helping these children. Far-reaching in its scope and firmly practical in its orientation, the book will prove instrumental in the identification, understanding, and treatment of learning disabilities.

We have seen these children—the shy and the sociable, the cautious and the daring—and wondered what makes one avoid new experience and another avidly pursue it. At the crux of the issue surrounding the contribution of nature to development is the study that Jerome Kagan and his colleagues have been conducting for more than two decades. In The Long Shadow of Temperament, Kagan and Nancy Snidman summarize the results of this unique inquiry into human temperaments, one of the best-known longitudinal studies in developmental psychology. These results reveal how deeply certain fundamental temperamental biases can be preserved over development.

Identifying two extreme temperamental types—inhibited and uninhibited in childhood, and high-reactive and low-reactive in very young babies—Kagan and his colleagues returned to these children as adolescents. Surprisingly, one of the temperaments revealed in infancy predicted a cautious, fearful personality in early childhood and a dour mood in adolescence. The other bias predicted a bold childhood personality and an exuberant, sanguine mood in adolescence. These personalities were matched by different biological properties. In a masterly summary of their wide-ranging exploration, Kagan and Snidman conclude that these two temperaments are the result of inherited biologies probably rooted in the differential excitability of particular brain structures. Though the authors appreciate that temperamental tendencies can be modified by experience, this compelling work—an empirical and conceptual tour-de-force—shows how long the shadow of temperament is cast over psychological development.