Today my colleague Ann Senghas explained to me Piaget’s concepts of Assimilation, Disequilibrium and Accommodation. When we are little children, many things happen that seem to make sense. Objects fall down, beds are soft, hands fit inside of gloves. These things are comprehensible to us because our minds have the capacity to assimilate them. It’s not just that they are happening, but that our brains are capable of making sense of them.
But then we encounter something that we cannot assimilate. Perhaps we see a helium balloon for the first time. This object is not falling down like it should — it’s breaking the rules. When things like this happen we enter a state of disequilibrium, and we feel that something has gone screwy with reality. Children usually respond to these events by creating new ways in their head of making sense of the world. This process of accommodation, sometimes called an “aha moment”, is usually quite pleasurable.
As we get older, fewer things surprise us, and these events become more rare. The price we pay for wisdom is that such moments of delighted astonishment can become few and far between.
When I heard this I thought about my recent musings on why we like puppets. The properly performed puppet, with its childlike expression and its intense gaze, is like a person in a state of continual transformation from disequilibrium to accommodation. We are entranced because its entire existence seems to consist of “aha moments”. We see this and we are reminded, perhaps unconsciously, of such rare and precious moments in our own lives.