Donald, Merlin, "Chapter Eighteen: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain", in: Vilarroya, Oscar and Forn i Argimon, Francesc(a?), Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi (2007), 215-222.
p. 215
Cultural networks are a vital link in the human cognitive process. They greatly affect the way we carry out our cognitive business.
p. 216
What type of cognitive change would have enabled a group of archaic hominides to start developing a communication system that led eventually to the invention of highly variable and arbitrary ... distinctive grammars, and symbolic cultures?
In most species the range of possible behaviors is largely fixed in the genes and closely attuned to its ecological niche. This results in what is sometimes called a "specialist survival strategy".
Human beings have broken out of this morphological straitjacket. ... Where would such flexibility have begun to evolve? This question leads us logically back to the fundamentals of human motor skills and procedural learning. To learn... and individual must carry out a sequence of basic cognitive operations. Traditionally, these include rehearsing the action, observing its consequences, rememering these and then altering...varying the parameters dictated by the memory ... or by an idealized image.
p. 217
we might call {this}... a "rehearsal loop."
Apes appear to be quite poor at rehearsal and meta-cognitive review.
They can engage in socially facilitated imitation, but they cannot independently initiate and rehearse actions ... for the sole purpose of refining their movement sequences.
... in contrast, even young children routinely engage in practicing and refining such skills
a cluster of more basic capacities, including gesture, imitation, and voluntary rehearsal itself, appears to have a common underlying neuro-cognitive architecrture... I have called these components "mimetic kills", or mimesis.
Mimesis involved a revolution in motor skill but also rested on ... Hominids had to gain access to the content of their kinematic memories. Apes appear quite poot at this.
p. 218
... mimesis resides in an imaginative capability unique to human beings.
Human mimetic skills cut across all major sensory and motor modalities.
... we cannot easily reduce mimetic action to discrete or digital algorithms combined according to rules. Instead, it appears fuzzy in its logic, more like the visual recognition of faces.
p. 219
Hominids could not have evolved a capability for language ... without meeting the cognitive preconditions for inventing a morpho-phonology.
On present evidence, this level of mimetic skill would have sufficed to explain the major cognitive achievements of archaic Homo from about two million years ago until about 60,000. ...for evolving a set of shared expressive customs and for triggering a legacy of nonverbal culture.
Language ... came much later.
The cognitive development of human beings depends upon their links with culture.
... an individual mind is a wormhole in a vast culturally defined space. :)
p. 220
All cultural networks, even those of oral cultures, harness the cognitive resources of many individuals and impose a larger organization ... on the mental functioning of individuals.
The most important network-level resources of culture are undoubtedly writing and literacy.
... Oral cultures are limited to the biological memories of their members.
... The earliest literate cultures, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Chine, resembled one another in their style f cognitive governance, despite great differences in the substance of their traditions.
Institutions ... are not conscious entities ... but they are cognitive entities and they do perform cognitive work.
p. 221
{they{ rarely depend on single individuals over the long run. They dominate the minds of their members, and individuals assimilate institutional values to such an extent that they rarely violate them.
culture ... invisible knowledge-gathering apparatus that reaches over time and space into the minds of millions of people.
It is difficult for us to accept the degree of our dependency... we are its primary servants.
No comments:
Post a Comment