learning

There was a program on PBS last night, NOVA, about language and the learning of it.  These scientists determined that babies learn human speech in much the same way that baby birds learn bird song by looking at the active parts of the brains and connections between them while this activity was going on.  We are all bird brains it seems.  We learn language the same way birds learn their songs, through listening and modulating sound to mimmick the sounds our adults are making.  Two parts of the brain are involved in this and it is the connections between the two that allow for speech or bird song.  Primates apparently don’t have the connections between the two parts.  They can make sound and they understand our words and can communicate with sign language (and teach it to their young) across specie lines (and how amazing is that!) but they do not have the ability to modulate sound into words.

What surprises me most about this is that there had to be a scientific study to prove it.  Not that we learn by mimmicking but that birds learned the same way.  The conventional wisdom has always been that only humans were capable of learning, of self-awareness, of awareness of other individuals and their environment.  For all other life it was instinct.  The simple fact that we are animals ourselves seemed to escape the attention of the scientists.  Anyone who ever paid attention to the other life around them already knew this.  It would be nice if this new scientific knowledge leads the human population to treat all other life with a little more respect but I don’t know.  We’re a pretty arrogant and destructive species.

Which brings me to another thought.  Where did this arrogance come from?  I don’t think it is so much from our ability to manipulate our environment.  We build some pretty elaborate houses but birds build some pretty elaborate nests, selecting their materials, weaving them tightly.  I’ve seen a cardinal in a tree looking at twigs, selecting one and then breaking it off.  That seems pretty sophisticated to me.  No, somewhere along the line we made a major shift.  We no longer thought of ourselves as a part of nature but rather apart from nature, that we did not need to respect and nuture the world but to use it.  Well, we’ve used it all right, used it to the point that it is becoming less and less able to support life.  In terms of longevity, we may turn out to be the least successful species this planet ever produced.