Video: Human Cognitive Evolution: How the Modern Mind Came into Being

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thank you very much I didn't I appreciate this invitation to be here and the opportunity to speak to what is obviously a very diverse and very interesting audience I am a bit of a

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polymath I've been interested in a lot of different subjects over the years and I've trained as a neuroscientist a cognitive neuroscientist but in my earlier experience I was a philosopher

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so I I have a wide range and some years ago I decided to try to trace the evolution of human beings from my Essene apes 5 million years ago our common

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ancestor with modern chimpanzees and so I'm going to just try to tell you as quickly as I can and in fairly straightforward way the story of how the human mind especially the modern mind

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came into being it's a it's a it's a complex story but I think the the bare bones can be exposed rather rather straightforward matter rather quickly

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my basic message is that what makes humans so different from other species from all the other species in the biosphere including our very close relatives the great apes is that we

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build distributed cognitive networks now any of you who do computing know what that is a distributed network is one made up with many computers where they pool their resources they don't try to

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solve all problems one at a time most animals are what you might call isolated minds and unfortunately a lot of early psychology and neuroscience was built on

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the isolated mind model the idea that something comes into your head you think about it you solve it and then you act in fact what we do is we we solve things collectively and in distributed network

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so gradually unfold that idea as I speak the human brain I've argued for at least two million years has co-evolved with the emergence of these distributed networks and it can't realize its design

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potential is to say we wouldn't even be speaking for example until it is immersed in such a network these networks themselves

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generate complex cognitive structures which were connected to and which reformat our our brains and therefore the brains task is is very complex we have to assimilate the structures of

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culture and manage them and I'm going to argue that a lot of our most complex thinking strategies are actually culturally imposed in the starting point

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of the human journey were micing primates about 5 million years ago and I just want to make a brief comment about them and that is that these are very smart animals very closely related to us anatomically as well as neuroanatomical

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II and even behaviorally if you don't think you are a primate take a good look in the mirror sometime and then take a look at the similarities between the human skeleton than that of any of the

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great apes we're a transformation on that skeleton and our nervous systems if we go into the brain is similarly very very similar to that of the great ape except that it's extremely large one of

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the things that they're very good at is social representation they understand the structure of their societies as an example of this the alpha male in a group of primates is actually the one

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with the biggest number of allies so he it's not easy to identify him in order to find out who the alpha male is the other members of the group have to understand the relationships that that

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male has with other individuals and that has ramifications all through the group so they spend a lot of their time sitting around watching one another now if you look at this image world from with permission prevents the wall you'll

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notice that that female has in her mind a an image of the group and it's it's independent of where she's looking at the moment she has she's monitoring everything that's going on in that group

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at the time and within that imagined space which we all are so good at as as primates she can move in and single out perhaps one individual arrival another

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female and think about her while continuing to manage to monitor the rest of the group well they construct out of this event representations they they can understand for example the events that lead to a

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change of power decline is an alpha male and a replacement by another or other types of things such as bonding relationships between individuals in the group the only thing they can do is they can't

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express that knowledge you know to anyone else whereas a human child watching let's say a dog fight and represent that dog fight in action for example by taking two

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models of dogs and having them fight even if they can't speak children can do this or they might get down on their hands and knees and act out the fight right but but no other creature can do this this is uniquely human they no one

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else can as it were act out an event representation we call this event reenactment so we can say that it's not just that they don't have speech and language they don't have the ability

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somehow to get the knowledge that they have in these very powerful brains that they have out the 12 nerves the 12 cranial nerves and the seven descending charisma spinal cord which is the only

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way out of the nervous system in action you have to be able to get that knowledge and reformat it all right so how did we do this we can do this the first cognitive leap I think occurred

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over 2 million years ago when we know with great certainty that humans became skilled there was a revolution in the cognitive control of movement humans rehearsed skill animals don't so for

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example many different types of primates throw things at one another when they have fights but you'll never see a primate standing in the forest all day throwing stones getting better at it the

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way human children do effortlessly and routinely we are sculptors with our bodies we can practice and modify skill it's one of our great characteristics and that of

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course if you know anything about brain anatomy the the truth is humans have something like ten times larger connection between the frontal lobes and the cerebellum then that apes and a much much larger cerebellum than these are

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structures that are important in skill now one of my first insights was that I realized that with with skill you get expressive culture free nonverbal expression basically it's the same

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neurological system that produces pantomime gesture and imitation thus produces knowledge networks in culture that are specific to particular cultures that sustain these skill networks for

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example to making industries two million years ago and this has led me to propose of what I call pneumatic social cognitive governance of a period in archaic human prehistory of almost two

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million years when human beings were essentially governed by embodied mechanisms of social control group learns and the group copies and transmits that knowledge in body

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memories and that controls the governance of emotion I'm going to give you some images that will perhaps him in this home mimetic governments in jurors

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in in in human beings in ritual custom and convention now this is a mural that was on the wall of the Peabody Museum at Yale I was there for four and a half years were

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and imaginative artist has tried what he thinks is the way the Homo erectus dealt with fire point is it's a it's a memetic culture there's a more recent and there is a very recent picture of memetic

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governance there again unfortunately as there is a tendency you know it's very very deep to conform and to need and be nurtured by

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ritual custom and Convention and all this is highly thematic and very unique to humans I seem to be having some difficulty getting this thing to work okay so just to review then magmatic

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social-cognitive governance dominated human prehistory for a long period and involves embodied social control and there's a great deal I could say about this but I better move on to the next

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phase because modern humans are much more than this we retained this aspect of our knowledge but in the secondly somewhere between 500,000 and 70,000 years ago there's strong reason to

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believe that speech and language emerged including the apparatus of speech which involves some major anatomical changes to the vocal tract into the neurology of the vocal system respiratory control and

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the lexical explosion speaks to the fact that we we have thousands of words as opposed to simply dozens of signals that apes have so we have tens of thousands of words actually the final thing is

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that the language defines itself as a powerful means of representation on the level of storytelling or narrative and that is the basis of what we call myth offs or a mythic culture languages as

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you'll notice one of the things it does is it reenacts events so here's a storyteller putting together these nodes into a story that reenacts an event

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which elicits in the imagination of elicitor a listener an experience that that listener never really had themselves the other revolutionary thing is that you can rearrange the events you can create false events

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an extremely powerful tool so this the second distributed network in culture then is the second domain is mythic culture and this involves narrative

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networks what we call the oral tradition in order to evolve this semantic and procedural memory to memory systems of the human brain had to vastly expand we also had to develop what's sometimes

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called mind sharing capability the ability to share knowledge and track it at high rates as it changes gossip being an example we track the relationships

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between people for hundreds and hundreds of individuals that we know and finally there is great selection here in Darwinian terms for executive and metacognitive skills skills often identified with the frontal lobes of the

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brain the adaptations underlying language I won't dwell on this too long but it does involve major challenges to the cognitive system one of the most interesting ones is multifocal attention

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and another it also a number of relevant brain have adaptations I won't have time tonight to dwell on this but there there is a lot of confirmatory evidence suggesting this from neuroscience social

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cognitive top governments then shifted for in in what we think of as classic human civilization is dominated by mythic culture and I think the last hundred thousand years we have very

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strong reasons to think that language and speech narratives dominate but the mimetic elements remain so ritual remains all of the body embodied types

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of social controls remain in place but subordinate abilities this image that I'm showing you is the coronation of queen elizabeth ii by the way what's interesting about it is that every order of society is represented symbolically

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it's a play act it's a it's a pantomime in a way and that includes the crowds outside and the police that are controlling the crowds and all the rest of it there's a social hierarchy unfolding

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and and spelled out to people in a very informative way that's a way of regulating behavior on a mass scale all right now I want to put in a third element into this before I tie it all

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together and that is that I think in the last 40,000 years we've had a revolution that is just as important in terms of our minds as the previous to the one in action which is my mace is one in

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language and now one that is caused by technology specifically memory technology and symbolic technology this created new media external to brains I

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call this external memory which imposed neural reorganization so in order to read for example you have to undergo a tremendous amount of training education was not necessary formal education

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system were not necessary until we had mathematics and and reading to learn there is a hypothesis called a cultural recycling hypothesis which I strongly

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support I'll just show you one example this was a study by Stanislas Dehaene and they colors de France in Paris which showed that basically when somebody

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learns to read certain cortical maps that are normally in the person who doesn't read and that's the vast majority of human beings in human history those maps would be used for something else but in being trained to read those

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maps are entrained for a different purpose and this has been studied in both the acquisition of mathematical skill as well as in in reading but it would apply to for example musicians learning how to handle notation and so

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on in other words dealing with symbols requires reorganizing the brain in a fundamental way it creates what are called cognitive architectures in the brain that are functional architectures

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from rewiring it I won't dwell on this particular image it's derived from the study of dyslexia and dysgraphia in psychology and everything that you see on the I guess

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on your left hand side a regular right hand side of that diagram is a hierarchy of structures that does not exist in the brain of someone who is illiterate which is 90% of human history we only invented

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writing about 5,000 years ago in other words in becoming literate the brain brain is functionally reorganized in a fairly radical way and so in imposing literacy on the large population you are

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literally reformatting the brains of large numbers of people in an important way now this leaves the possibility of what I call hybrid networks Carl Ashley

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years ago formulated the word Engram which refers to a memory record in the brain and there at least four or five different types of memory records in the brain I've used suggested the word exa

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gram to covered memory records that are stored outside the brain so encyclopedias archives books libraries and so on all of those things not to mention the Internet this has caused something that you could call the extra

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graphic revolution which has involved the invention of the human by the human species of an external symbolic storage system this system which involves a variety of different types of media including things such as Stonehenge

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that's a computational device has novel properties that are biologically very important such memories are reformatted like I'd love to reformat I brain but I can't do it you know they're quasi

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permanent they outlive individuals whereas our memories die with us it has unlimited capacity whereas individual memories of humans have great very great limitations there are new retrieval

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options for example you can Google your brain you can't but you can in various ways access technological memories and it performed to work

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as we see in computers and so the the history of EXA grams is is a very important part of human history and it has complexified our stored knowledge our collective networks if you wanted

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knowledge by essentially addressing all previous forms of knowledge in terms as well as introducing new forms of knowledge such as mathematics and mathematics is really the history of

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notations that's what it really is this created institutional change over a long period of time several thousand years and a shift in networked memory to non neural media our brains are

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increasingly entrained to those networks most of us in modern society are employed by the external symbolic storage system you know we worked for it for 50 years put one brick in the edifice and expired

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if we're lucky you know that's so that's essentially what happens we're very much wired into the network so all three domains coexist in modern society and hybrid distributed cognitive network so now you look at the stock exchange a

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little differently and these individuals in this exchange are old-fashioned human beings they cannot function without these embodied social controls that I talked about pneumatic in mathematic

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culture they cannot function they cannot become individuals with identities with without plugging into the oral tradition into the whole mythic tradition that backs it up but finally the governance

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of the world is now shifting to what we might call hybrid distributed systems I think this has major consequences for the way we think about ourselves I'm

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sorry I for that image just flew by that's a visualization of the Internet that's quite famous and it's interesting and all of these networks encompass all of the stages of revolution

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simultaneously we are becoming something that we have never been before you know there were we're in a sense in an adventure of self-discovery now if I can get this

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thing to change there we go the long-term outcome of all of this of assimilating artificial memory into our networks or into our cultural networks is what I call theoretic governance and theoretical culture now theoretical Chur

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runs by different rules than anything that has preceded it it's dominated by analytic thinking which are institutionalized analytically as as we find in government corporations science

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legal systems and technology especially it has had an important impact on the arts where I think the arts are much stronger in the oral mythic tradition and in mimetic the side of things for

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example in cinema and in dance and you might say that that the emergence of theoretic governance has had a major impact on the cultural cognitive structure of human being says group now

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I this is a much reproduced diagram and I don't gonna leave it up there very much but basically this results in a four-level type of model of the way the

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mind works it has implications for things like morality because morality emerges from all of these different levels we can say there is a kind of

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morality in many social animals that show some form of altruistic behavior for example not killing someone who submits and that sort of thing the thing about humans that is so particular is

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that we can override our basic instincts and so models of morality that are based on studies of animals have only limited application because human beings basically can construct morality in a

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variety of ways and may or may not behave in ways that are consistent with as it were with their instincts we can demonstrate this by just looking at many different cultures in

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history and we can see almost anything that you can find in one culture can be found to be contradicted in another somewhere I've suggested that there is a

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contrasting style between traditional mythical culture of the traditional oral traditions of mythic culture and in what we call the new emerging high-tech

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theoretic culture this list is one that I've presented a number of times and but all always elicited the question are these descriptive terms for example

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narrative versus analytic Authority based versus evidence based slow and deep versus fast in shallow inner versus outer focus highly emotional versus less

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so closed versus open ended and so on are these necessarily fixed or could it be that we could have a traditional form of culture that was entirely compatible

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with modern theoretic culture and vice-versa is theoretical churn necessarily this way I think this is an overriding concern that cuts across many different very practical fields endeavor

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in modern world and that a systematic approach to it might help I'm not fooling myself that you can perhaps modify legal systems political systems

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and so on in any simple way with these ideas but it may help at least put them in perspective in help us understand that they're all linked to real live red-blooded human

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beings who have gone through an awfully rapid evolution in the last few hundred years to the point where I sometimes I'm concerned about our ability to manage

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such a fast rate of change but it it is also true that we've been remarkably successful in holding the whole thing together and I I sincerely hope that for

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the sake of my children and grandchildren that we will continue this on the future thanks very much