Human beings learning

Texture is a sensory property of food. It arises from the food s physical structure, which is derived from the interactions of its constituent parts, and is perceived by monitoring how the structure responds to externally applied conditions. During development human beings learn to associate particular sensory responses from handling and eating foods, with specific textural characteristics. From verbal interactions with other humans they develop their textural vocabulary. The natural approach to characterising a food s texture is to ask human subjects to detail their assessments of texture. 

Few commodities have had such a fundamental impact on modern society as fossil fuels. Before human beings learned to exploit the energy stored in the hydrocarbon bonds of fossil fuels, they relied solely on muscular effort, direct solar, wind and water energy and the energy stored in biomass. In the last two hundred years, the remarkable rise of the coal, oil and more recently the natural gas industries has led to radical changes in almost every aspect of life. 

The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but seek responsibility. 

The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but also to seek responsibility. Avoidance of responsibility, lack of ambition, and emphasis on security are generally consequences of experience, not inherent human characteristics. 

The human brain is comprised of many millions of interconnected units, known individually as biological neurons. Each neuron consists of a cell to which is attached several dendrites (inputs) and a single axon (output). The axon connects to many other neurons via connection points called synapses. A synapse produces a chemical reaction in response to an input. The biological neuron fires if the sum of the synaptic reactions is sufficiently large. The brain is a complex network of sensory and motor neurons that provide a human being with the capacity to remember, think, learn and reason. 

As mentioned by the authors in their preface, the achievements in total synthesis have been so numerous and so important that it is clearly impossible to include them all in a single volume. My hope is that Classics in Total Synthesis will be successful and that it will be followed by a continuing series. Such a collection will add to our reading pleasure and further encourage and inspire new generations of chemists to dare the impossible (or even the unfashionable). There is much still to be learned and to be discovered. Humanity will be enriched beyond measure if the twenty-first century is a period of continued vigorous development of synthetic chemistry. 

Everything an individual can do has been learned, apart from a few basic reflexes that are innate and functioning from the time a human being is bom. 

Everyday experience shows us that all human beings are unique in their external appearance and can be safely distinguished if only sufficient independent physical traits are compared. From so-called identical twins we learn that a considerable part of this phenotype is inherited. 

---