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 mimesis 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 enhanced mimetic capacity is one the important if not the most important advances 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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Print Books	More Information	Download
	Group Dynamics
	The Good Person
	Pieces of the Puzzle
	The Sound of Music
	Language and Thinking
	I and Thou
	Emotions and Feelings
	Neuroscience Notes
	Children and Family
	Intelligence and Learning
	Religion for 21st Century

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 2011.  The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/intelligence/