One of the first things a newborn does is track faces. Within minutes of birth, infants will turn their heads toward simple arrangements of dark shapes that resemble eyes and a mouth. This early sensitivity is not learned. It is a built-in system that gives the infant a starting point for understanding the world.

Mark Johnson and his colleagues call this system CONSPEC. It guides the newborn’s attention to faces during the first weeks of life. In Mastery, I described this as the “primal sketch” of human vision. These early fixations begin a perceptual cascade that helps humans lean into a world filled with visual complexity. The first months are spent tracking faces, before we shift our attention to objects, before eventually linking objects with sounds. It is the primal sketch, the scaffold of a rich visual category system that supports everything from spatial reasoning to literacy.

Today, perhaps for the first time in our species' history, this ancient sequence is unfolding in a very different environment.

A study in Nature Communications examined adults who had congenital cataracts removed in infancy. The researchers found that a short period of early visual deprivation left lasting effects on the earliest stage of the visual system. The primary visual cortex, which processes basic features such as contrast and orientation, never fully recovered.

Yet higher-level areas in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC), which recognize categories like faces and objects, looked surprisingly typical. These regions developed normally through years of later visual experience. This finding confirms what developmental scientists have suspected. Different parts of the visual system have different sensitive........

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