Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book)
concept of brain-culture coevolution.
p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology.
p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era.
p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way.
p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind.
p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture.
p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development.
P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago.
p. 28ff: about encultured apes
p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume.
p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour
p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher.
p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one.
p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar.
p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species.
p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another.
p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action.
p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside.
p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols.
p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony
p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991.
p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture".
p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized.
p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE
p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago.
p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution.
p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is.
p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving.
p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it.
p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture.
p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite.
p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more.
p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information.
p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE.
p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
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