Persona Digital Online
Books --Psychology, Philosophy
and Neuroscience

Readings from Intelligence and Learning
by Stephen Gislason MD

Cognition
Selftalk and Thinking
Decisions
Praxis and Mimesis
Reading and Writing
Mathematics
Information
IQ Measurement
Social Intelligence
Learning
Best Teachers
Genius
Persona Books

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Humans act on the world through praxis or skilled movements.  Skilled movements are learned slowly by diligent practice. The main adaptive task is to learn what movements are required for survival today.

Ten thousand years ago, if you were male, you might have learned to throw a spear and carry a deer carcass on your back. Today, you learn to learn to throw a football, move a pen across a paper surface and push keys on a keyboard.

Humans learn by imitating what they see and hear. Learning movement skills is implicit in life experiences and not recognized as learning. For most humans, lessons learned at school are relatively unimportant. The central feature of intelligence is the ability to understand what is really going on out there and to respond to events with successful and adaptive behavior. Praxis is integral to intelligence. If you add mimeses to praxis, you start building a meaningful model of intelligence.

Mimesis is the ability to imitate and copy the movements of others. Humans learn by imitating what they see and hear. This mimetic capacity is one the important if not the most important new development in the human brain.

Humans create neuronal models of their own behavior and the behavior of others, remember and communicate these models. We can simulate experience and anticipate what we are going to do in the future.

We can practice skills in advance so that can improve our performance. We can expand this modeling capacity into verbal and body communication, invent language and substitute words for objects and action.

We can learn to handle words much like objects and do symbolic transactions with each other.

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Language and Thinking

Intelligence & Learning

Intelligence and Learning is part of the  Psychology & Philosophy series, developed by Persona Digital Books. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from the book published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason and the publisher is Persona Digital Books. The most recent date of publication is 2010.  The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/intelligence/