My son, Blaizon, is six years old, an age defined by otherworldly thoughts and pursuits. I often try to penetrate his mental bastion using the interpretive tools of cognitive psychology, but I am not so conventionally learned as to assume that these tools provide me anything resembling a clear window into his cerebr-o-sphere.

Child psychology exists largely because we cannot access our childhood memories in any detailed way. Yes, we might have a limited need for experimental child psychology even if we could remember in detail, but the theoretical approach would be replaced by a sort of empirical cataloging.

Realizing that my window into Blaizon’s experiential world is fogged over by three decades of adult experience, I value any opportunity I get to rub away the dewy condensation and peer into a mind that very much resembles my own at age six. I was graced with such a transparent window last Sunday evening.

Busy as he is with the rather important business of boyhood, Blaizon and I connect most closely in the evenings, when his physical exuberance dims to a sort of intellectual after-glow sustained by resistance to bedtime. On Sunday night he popped a question that sparked my own childhood memories, thereby not only parting his cognitive curtain, but throwing open my own.

“Daddy,” he enquired, “how do we know how things work just by thinking about them?”

My internal scientist replied “We don’t. We have to learn how things work.”

He persisted in his claim: “But I can just think about something and I know how it works,” so I asked him to demonstrate what he meant by telling me what wires were made of. He answered “Wires are made of rubber.”

I asked him if he knew how electricity traveled through the wire and he explained that it just went through like water through a straw.

“So the wires are hollow?” I asked, and he agreed.

I told him that only the outsides were made of rubber and that electricity was conducted by a metal inside of the rubber. I explained that electricity did indeed flow like water, but that it flowed through a solid metal rather than an open space.

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