Human Beings’ Superpower Is Imitation

Summary

Human beings' unique ability to imitate and use language allows them to learn from each other's experiences, effectively binding time and creating a cumulative knowledge base that transcends individual lifetimes.

Abstract

The article posits that the advent of language revolutionized human learning and social development by enabling us to share and accumulate knowledge across generations. Unlike other animals that rely on individual trial and error, humans can imitate each other and convey experiences through language, which has significantly shaped our understanding of what it means to be human. This social learning process means that humans do not have to relearn everything from scratch but can benefit from the wisdom of their predecessors. The article emphasizes that this ability to bind time through shared knowledge is a defining characteristic of humanity, distinguishing us from plants that bind energy and animals that bind space.

Opinions

The author suggests that human evolution has shifted from a purely biological process to a social one due to the acquisition of language.
It is implied that the human capacity for imitation and instruction is a 'superpower' that sets us apart from other forms of life.
The article conveys the idea that cultural development and social cohesion are significantly enhanced by our ability to learn from one another.
The author emphasizes the importance of believing in the value of past generations' experiences for the continuation of human knowledge and progress.
The concept of 'binding' is introduced to describe how different life forms (plants, animals, and humans) utilize and preserve different resources (energy, space, and time, respectively).

Instead of learning from personal experience, we learn from one another

Credit: Images Etc/Getty Images

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 that they (and the animals that eat them) can metabolize. But plants are, for the most part, rooted in one place.

Animals are mobile. They can move around and make use of any resources they can reach, whether they walk, run, jump, or fly. The plant must wait for rain. The animal can find water anywhere in its roaming range or even migrate to find a new source. While the plant binds energy, the animal binds space.

Humans’ social, imitative, and language abilities give us even more binding power. What makes humans special is that we can also bind time. We don’t need to experience everything for ourselves over the course of a single lifetime. Instead, we benefit from the experiences of our predecessors, who can tell us what they’ve learned. Because we have evolved to imitate one another, a parent can show a child how to hunt or how to operate the television remote. The child doesn’t necessarily need to figure it out from scratch. Because we have evolved the ability to speak, we can use language to instruct others. Don’t touch the red snake; it’s poisonous.

Through language and instruction, humans create a knowledge base that compresses or binds many centuries of accumulated wisdom into the learning span of a single generation. We do not need to reinvent all knowledge anew every time. But we must, at least provisionally, believe that people of the past have something to teach us.

This is section 13 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.