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Multimediali
We’re almost at the end — and we’re gathered around a fire: the place where humanity stopped restarting from zero.
What does that mean?
According to neuroscientist Joshua Greene, we learn through trial and error — but in three very different ways.
Some things we learn through direct experience, like when as children we touched a hot pan, got burned, and learned not to do it again.
Other things we learned without ever having to try: they were written in our genes from the moment we were conceived — shaped by the fatal mistakes of ancestors who did not survive long enough to pass on their DNA.
And then there are things we learned from the experience of others — from stories, teaching, imitation, and memory. Perhaps that process began right here, around a fire like this one, tens of thousands of years ago. That is how culture was born — and with it, a new form of collective intelligence.
So: three ways of learning.
But for Greene, being intelligent is not only learning from experience — ours or someone else’s. It is also something more: it is the ability to observe the mind with the mind, to think about thinking, not just to understand something — but to understand how we came to understand it. A capacity cognitive scientists call metacognition.
And this exhibition — here, in its final room — aimed to do exactly that: to offer you a space where you could look at intelligence, including your own, from one step outside yourself.
As we said at the beginning: the case on intelligence is still open.
Before you is the investigation board — the one we might have built if someone had handed us the case: a partial map of what we know today about intelligence. You’ll find the names of those who studied the topic, open questions and ongoing debates, connections that seem solid and others still to be drawn, alongside the books and keywords that guided our thinking.
We placed this board around a fire — the place where knowledge becomes shared — for a reason: because we’d love for you to leave a trace too.
Write the title of a book you think is missing, a question, a doubt, or simply something that struck you along the way.
Add your clue to the case.
We hope you managed to follow — and lose — the thread, and to enjoy this journey through one of the most fascinating mysteries of human inquiry.
One last thing: before you exit, you’ll once again see the four videos you encountered at the entrance. Watch them again and ask yourself, with new eyes:
In which situations would you now speak of intelligence? Has your answer changed? What is intelligence?
Thank you for visiting.