Evolution equips every species particularly well for tasks that helped its members live and reproduce. Humans, too, are specialists in the abilities that helped us navigate our characteristic environment. That applies to perception as much as to behavior.
We sometimes feel that our senses present the whole of reality. In fact, they reveal a very small selection. Human eyes detect only a narrow part of the light spectrum. We cannot directly see the polarization of light, while bees use it to orient themselves across a landscape.
Our celebrated ability to think has limits of the same kind. We can reason about height, width, depth and time. Additional dimensions can be represented mathematically, but most of us cannot form a direct mental picture of them.
Experience exceeds language
Some realities are perfectly familiar yet difficult to describe. Try explaining the taste of an olive or a papaya to someone who has never encountered one. “Salty,” “bitter” and “fruity” circle the experience without reproducing it.
The human brain is not an all-purpose instrument designed to represent everything. It is a tool refined through a very long practical test. It is exceptionally good at problems that once mattered for surviving, relating to other people and raising children.
Precisely exchanging a complex flavor appears not to have been as urgent as recognizing food, faces, intentions and danger. Our difficulty is therefore not a failure of intelligence. It is a glimpse of how every mind — including a child’s developing mind — is both powerful and particular.