Imitation is Instinctive

The complexity of our brains makes us natural learners and imitators.

Recent research shows that babies begin to imitate facial expressions and gestures from an early age whether they are rewarded or not. Babies are able to mimic facial expressions they see and sounds they hear when they are too young to have learned by practice or by looking in mirrors (Meltzoff 1990). Successfully imitating something seems to be rewarding in itself. We can see now, as the behaviourists could not, why so much of our behavior has to be instinctive. The world is too complicated to cope with if we have to learn everything from scratch. Indeed, learning itself cannot get off the ground without inbuilt competencies. We humans have mroe instincts than other species, not fewer. As Steven Pinker puts it 'complexity in the mind is not caused by learning, learning is caused by complexity in the mind.'