Re: Discover Magazine blog entitled “How Identical Twins Develop Different Personalities” (May 9 2013)
Identical twins who grow up in the same home are not growing up in the same environment. They change each other’s environment. More specifically, they change each other’s learning environment.
This entire otherwise good story fails to point to what is most significant. The twins LEARN to differentiate themselves. “Nurture” is an ‘outside-in’ description of the effects of what is essentially ‘inside-out’ learning. “Interact with their surroundings” is yet another way of implying learning while pointing us away from recognizing it. This article is full of ‘other words for learning‘ and, in that sense, another example of how current science expresses these issues in ways that contribute to our society’s lack of understanding of and appreciation for the role of learning in human lives.
Why are you who you are? Because you learned to be who you are. Everything about who you are that is not determined biologically (or for some, divinely endowed,) is learned.
If we started caring for how infants learn to become children and children learn to become adults, everything would change. Because learning is involved in everything, changing how we think about learning can change everything. We are, I am, learned.
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