Thorndike described the cat’s learning like this: “The one impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened and stamped in.” He said that animal learning is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.”[1] Keep that phrase in mind whenever you see anyone (including yourself) making repetitive motions on a touch screen, as if in a trance: “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.”
