by Alexandra Kraeler Corbin (Author)
How do humans recognize? If you say by experience and habit, that is certainly true. But as with all learning, there has to be a system that incites the need to apply experience in the first place and then has a way of both editing and then transforming experience into codes that get tucked neatly into some kind of highly accessible format. All animals do this. But humans elaborate far more with the basics. There is something distinctly remarkable about a key element in our brain that expedites recognition systems by means of swapping out the 'self' in terms of many other animate and inanimate objects. We imagine we are 'others'. Other people, other things. We don't yet know to what extent other animals do this. It is relative based on their brains, of course. What we have done with this basic behavior is the stuff of civilization, and of course, of the creative abilities that mesmerize us.