If you think that merely reading history books would help you learn “from other’s mistakes,” consider the following nineteenth-century experiment. In a well-known psychology case the Swiss doctor Claparède had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen minutes for her to remember who he was. One day he secreted a pin in his hand before shaking hers. The next day she quickly withdrew her hand as he tried to greet her, but still did not recognize him. Since then plenty of
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