ABSTRACT
All animals learn. It is one of the characteristics of living things that they change as they grow and respond to their environments. Human beings are designed to learn all their life; they depend on it in ways that apply less to other animals. Even other mammals have many more instinctive or inbuilt behaviour patterns than we do. It is almost impossible to observe learning taking place; what we see is the behaviour or performance changes which result from learning. Recent developments in brain scanning are producing interesting observations of the changes taking place in the brain during learning, but even here the significance is only to be guessed at. This chapter is a very simplified version of the theories to date, but it may spur you on to find out more for yourself [1.6, 2.7]. Some of the content of this and following chapters is an expanded version of material from my previous books.
