tl;dr -- This article is a barefaced example of rank ignorance. Author/editors have no idea what "information" and "algorithm" means. Instead, they seem to be dealing with those concepts as ignorant rubes.

A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces

The latter phrase reflects a well established and important developmental fact. I'm very curious about the first phrase. Is this also an established fact in the science of human development? On the face of it, it seems like an extraordinary piece of research if that's true. One cannot, of course, simply ask a baby if their vision is blurry. Their visual acuity needs to be inferred, and some cleverness would be required to do this reliably and accurately.

Anyone know which study this refers to? (Or is this an example of why this article is pretty darn fluffy?)

EDIT: Arrgh! This article is ignorant fluff!

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

The brain can contain information. That's simply an evident fact. Does the author understand what information means?

The human nervous system also embodies algorithms. That's also a fact established by neuro-biology. The visual system is full of algorithms. I think the author doesn't understand what these words mean. All of the other words seem to be thrown in there to evoke images of machine parts that don't look like people parts. It's exactly the cargo-cult misunderstanding of the underlying principles, in mistaken deference to resemblances.

Also, anyone who's delved into Rubik's Cube solving knows that we humans can develop and embody algorithms. (The scene plays fast and loose with the term, but they do use algorithms in a mathematical sense.) This author loses a whole lot of academic credibility for writing this, and the editors of this website do as well for publishing this. This is just rank ignorance on the level of publishing a perpetual motion machine article. It's 2016. If you are publishing a factual article of interest to intellectuals, and you don't understand what information or an algorithm is, you have to more business writing, editing, and publishing such an article than if you had no idea of what the periodic table means.

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

As a traditional musician who can play several hundred melodies from memory, I can say this is complete BS. He's simply stupid playing games with terminology. What I know from my experience and that of many fellow musicians, is that we do have to retrieve melodies. In fact, sometimes we have to take a few minutes to make sure we have all parts of the melody retrieved. You can go out to pubs in SF and see traditional musicians sit there and do this. Sometimes the right cue needs to occur for the complete retrieval to happen. Some musicians have certain melodies they can only remember after they remember the name.