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Athena Vouloumanos    [An edited transcript of the interview
follows.]  What is a critical period? It's supposed to be a
window in development that defines the only period in which a
thing can be learned.  How has our understanding about this
concept changed? There used to be an idea that there were very
strict critical periods,   that you had to learn something by a
certain time or you wouldn't be able to do it all. That's the
dominant idea in the textbooks. What we've found in the last
decade is that there's a gradual decline rather than an
immediate falloff.  Neurons do become less flexible over time,
which makes learning more difficult, but not all in one moment.
There's sort of a gradual decline. The other thing that gets in
the way relates to interferences with what's learned early in
life. So if you try to learn a new la