It is the ability of the newborn brain to rapidly create, through the experiences it is exposed to, the relief of the cortex. To absorb knowledge quickly and effortlessly.
Imagine that the brain of a newborn child is like the map of Paris, when it was still a small city. Without many streets, which increase as the city grows. Some become main roads, but there are smaller ones that connect the main roads and others even smaller. These roads branch off and create a dense network.
Likewise, in a baby’s brain, the network of connections from neuron to neuron is small at first, but grows at an incredible rate, the fastest in a human’s lifetime. In the first six years of life, the young mind seems to absorb everything around it.
During this period, the child not having built his personality, absorbs without barriers and defenses everything that happens in his environment. It “sucks up” everything like a sponge. It possesses a special power, which may be called the power of adaptation. It is a process in which the child uses the environment for its development and in this way, becomes part of this environment. The young child absorbs the culture of his time and place, taking in all the spirit, (the language, customs, aspirations and attitudes) of a society, simply by living within that society.
The human mind with which we are born, was called by Maria Montessori the “assimilating mind” and is essentially the creation of the unconscious, a time that we do not remember but we always carry with us.