>
> My resistance to the idea of imitation in activities like walking (in
> very early years) is that the kind of concentration required is utterly
> different than watching others walk. So I actually agree with Chris---to
> a certain extent.
>
> I knew about this difference from watching climbers, and then learning
> to climb. It's a qualitatively different kind of learning and thinking.
> What it feels like is learning through the body.
> ...SNIP...
> Climbing with a blind partner is a strange experiment in learning that
> for motion and space knowledge we depend more on kinesthic sense system
> than a visual or auditory system. It's this kinesthic sense system that
> we use to walk and make body motions in space.
> ...SNIP...
You want to practice enough so that you
> don't have to either think through the move or engage any more
> conscieous part of the brain. Playing an instrument or learning a long
> complicated dance routine is a similar form of learning.
>
> CG
>
This helps a lot but I'm trying to figure out why you separate the imitative and the kinesthetic? and I'm noting that my primary concern wasn't so much to support the idea of imitation, it was to indicate that this kind of learning isn't something kids do on their own, asocially and w/o our aid/teaching.
I was a pretty good high school wrestler and I know exactly what you mean about kinesthetic knowledge but I can't recall doing a single move I hadn't seen someone else do, wanting to do it, being shown how to do it, messing it up, watching - once again - those who did it w/o thinking, being corrected and correcting myself and gradually learning to do it myself, initially consciously and later w/o thinking about the parts and - once I really knew it - doing it perfectly without thinking or the conscious temporal experience of doing it... which, I should say, was one of the most explosively joyous experiences I've ever had. It happened about once a year when I was playing Ultimate at a high level, only once as a kid diver, once as an adult softball batter, and sadly never in all my many years as a soccer player. I happened twice, intellectually, in grad school - the stars aligned, mental ecstacy.
I actually had the same kind of imitative, intellectual and kinesthetic experience learning how to do tissue culture research in a bone marrow transplant lab... and my dad said that the glass blowing he did as a biophysicist was a learned craft practice necessary to do the Science - much like the apparatus assemblage he did, later, as a physicist of the acoustics of solids - and one that some folks couldn't do and had to change fields as a result.