ABSTRACT
What is learnable by infants and children, and is functional culturally, shapes their language of dis-ease. The primary cultural context for most infants is their family, but by school age their culture is much more complex (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Development is the process whereby people come to understand reality in its full complexity, and their place in it. People become structurally coupled to their environment of development. In this chapter I present a current understanding of memory systems and their roles in helping people learn from experience and appreciate reality. When taken together with knowledge about how the brain develops, and registers emotions and states of disease, we then
have a basis for what is learnable about disease and a foundation for understanding the language of dis-ease, the communicative system of symptoms. This entails knowledge of the world, of words and social processes.
