Why is experience our best teacher?
We do not fully understand why doing something rather than reading about it or learning it from someone else affects us so powerfully, but there are several theories that shed some light on the issue.
Firstly, there is a theory that when we have a direct experience of an event we lay down multiple ‘versions’ of the event in our brains. These might include motor or kinaesthetic representations associated with our body movements, the coding of visual and auditory information about the event and physiological feedback from our bodies – sensations, emotions and so on. The idea is that the combination of all these non-verbal memory traces lodges the meaning of the experience at a deeper level. We certainly know ...
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