Copying movement is primitive in us — and when I say primitive, I mean it’s deep in our biology, not a skill we developed but something we’re genuinely programmed to do. This isn’t metaphor. For human beings, copying is the secret of our success (concept) points at exactly this: imitation isn’t a shortcut, it’s the mechanism. Research on the development of imitation and the mirror system backs this up — the neural architecture for copying is built in, shaped by experience but not invented by it.
What most people get wrong when learning a physical skill is that they try to break it into components. They want to be taught the parts. But that’s not how it actually works — you learn the gestalt, the whole thing at once, the way it actually moves in the world. This is where the Learning by Copying idea gets interesting: you’re not assembling a skill piece by piece, you’re absorbing a pattern. That’s also what makes the Inner Game of Tennis insight land so hard — you don’t need to teach people, you just need to let them watch.
The implication is that watching is serious practice. What imitation tells us about social cognition shows how deeply tied imitation is to how we understand other minds — it’s not passive observation, it’s active resonance. You could even connect this to neurolinguistic programming, which is built on the idea that you can model excellence by watching and internalizing how someone moves and thinks. Use Analogies When It Comes to Movement captures something similar — the body learns through likeness, through recognition, not through instruction.
Knowing all this changes how I’d approach picking up something physical. I’d watch a lot of video. And if I could, I’d watch people doing it in person, because there’s something in the live version that recordings don’t fully capture. Evolution, development and intentional control of imitation suggests our imitative capacity was shaped over a long time for exactly this — learning from proximity, from presence. The body knows what to do with that input. You just have to give it the exposure.