Has anyone done research on this vitally important topic? Do animals need to learn how to do it or do they pick it up instinctively?<\/p>\n
I wish to assure my readers that I have a perfectly scientific interest in this topic.\u00a0 It appears that human animals need to be taught. We\u00a0hear stories of conservatively brought up young men and women entering adulthood perfectly ignorant of the granular details of the sex act, often with embarrassing consequences. These stories led me to the question I have posed.\u00a0 Mammals other than humans without the benefit of our cognitive capacity or our capacity for language and communication seem to manage just fine. Then why is it that only humans have this problem?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One possible answer is that animals are in fact being taught, in the same way that cats teach their young ones to hunt. Perhaps animals do learn from their siblings, or are given an initiation by senior members of the opposite sex. If so, I am keenly interested in knowing of any research that has been done on this topic. Unfortunately, this is a difficult topic to google.<\/p>\n
The other possible answer is that animals do not<\/em>\u00a0 need to be taught. This answer is quite plausible. We often hear of attempts to mate endangered animals like the Panda. Often, they have been brought up in captivity, away from the environs that would school them in the art. These attempts are often failures, but are sometimes successful. That at least some attempts are successful indicate that animals are capable of figuring out what to do without being trained. I may be wrong in this, of course. This is just a tentative conclusion – many other possibilities are whirring in my mind, which I will not go into.<\/p>\n But if it turns out that animals do not in fact need to be taught,\u00a0I do have to wonder if we are witnessing an example of humans losing an instinctive skill because of their capacity to learn. It is becoming increasingly established that focusing too much on the mechanical details of a performance tends to degrade your performance. I recently read of an experiment – I am too lazy to dig up links- where athletes were divided into two random groups and and given sets of words to focus on before practice. The group that was assigned words denoting details of the act did worse than the group that was given abstract words that had to do with the performance as a whole. I wonder if humans forgetting about sex is an example of the same phenomenon. If you plan to do research and establish this link, please make sure to credit me with the original hypothesis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Has anyone done research on this vitally important topic? Do animals need to learn how to do it or do they pick it up instinctively? I wish to assure my readers that I have a perfectly scientific interest in this topic.\u00a0 It appears that human animals need to be taught. We\u00a0hear stories of conservatively brought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}