The Disappearance of Insight: When Technology Undermines How and Why

How we can prepare children to find insights and cognitive agency in a world of ever shrinking opportunities to learn how things work.

From infancy onwards, children show a natural interest in the hidden causes of surface patterns. But that kind of childhood is being derailed by a world that is no longer causally transparent. Younger generations seek different kinds of explanations now, value different kinds of experts, and are more prone to outsource their understandings. In many cases, they don’t realize how much they have surrendered their intellectual efficacy. What does this all mean for their learning? In The Disappearance of Insight, Frank Keil investigates how rapid technological change is shaping the world around us--and what this all means for our children and their futures.

Explanation and understanding are at the heart of a cognitively meaningful life. But the things we can explain and want to understand are dramatically changing. In many cases, over the past fifty years or so, those things—and parts of things—have shifted from easily interpretable components to opaque ones. In 1960, for example, the insides of thermostats, cameras, and clocks revealed how they worked. Today, their insides are indecipherable circuit boards.

The author shows why insight and explanations are at the heart of higher-level human cognition; explores how artifacts and their roles in evolving cultures can shape thought and developing minds; and does much more, in this fascinating deep dive into cognition, learning, and AI.

Frank C. Keil is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He received an NIH MERIT award and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His most recent book is Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science.