Human Beings’ Superpower Is Imitation
Instead of learning from personal experience, we learn from one another
Language changed everything. Once people acquired speech, cultural development and social cohesion no longer depended on increasing our brain size. Evolution shifted from a purely biological process to a social one. With language, humans gained the ability to learn from one another’s experiences. The quest for knowledge began.
Other animals, such as apes, learn by doing. Episodic learning, as it’s called, means figuring things out oneself through trial and error. Fire is hot. If you can remember what happened last time you touched it, you don’t touch it again. Even simpler creatures store the equivalent of learning as instincts or natural behaviors, but they are procedural and automatic. Humans, on the other hand, can learn by imitating one another or, better, representing their experiences to one another through language. This is big and may give us the clearest way of understanding what it means to be human.
The difference between plants, animals, and humans comes down to what each life form can store, leverage, or — as this concept has been named — “bind.” Plants can bind energy. They transform sunlight into biological energy. By spreading their leaves, they harvest ultraviolet rays and turn them into energy…
