How did our mind and brain evolve?
One of the big unanswered questions in psychology (it’s also relevant for a few other fields) is how our mind and brain evolved. Merlin Donald has invested a lot of effort into answering that question. Last year he had a paper published which tries to answer it (or at least head towards an answer) through a discussion of the co-evolution of brain and culture. This post and the next two will cover the central ideas of the paper.
Like the chicken and the egg, the evolution of brain and culture are so intertwined that the question of which came first is just as difficult to answer. And maybe just as irrelevant; figuring out which came first is a distraction from figuring out the processes involved. Donald refers to how groups of our distant ancestors gradually became involved in more and more complex interactions. This included relatively simple imitation of tool-making and tool-using through to more cognitively demanding activities such as cooperative hunting and migration. These interactions became an increasingly complex and ever more important part of culture. Without social interaction we don’t develop many of the abilities we tend to take for granted (like language). We’ve now reached a point where exposure to sociocultural influences is absolutely necessary for the full development of an infant into an adult.
Donald compares the interactions between people (and each person’s brain) and culture to a distributed network of computers (e.g., the Internet). Like any computer connected to the Internet a person “connected” to culture is capable of much more than a person alone. The connection between people takes the form of social interaction. It starts with learning the basic social skills necessary to develop a more complex connection. That more complex connection allows us to learn the skills necessary to use the abundant technology which culture allowed us to create.
Literacy also emerged from the co-evolution of brain and culture. Reading and writing depend on spending lots of time learning very specific skills to the point where they’re automatic. Since they require such extensive learning those skills are clearly not innate. After all, no-one can read without being told what the squiggly lines mean. But it’s also clear that the learning process produces physical changes in the brain. This can be seen in people who’ve suffered very specific brain damage and are unable to read, but can still write, while others have the opposite problem.
The skills required to use various forms of technology are also obviously learned, but not so obvious are the changes that learning and continued use has on the development of our brain. It’s possible that habitual, culture-specific skills which people learn from a young age, such as using the Internet, result in physical changes in the brain just as they do for literacy. However more research needs to be done before we can reach any strong conclusions.
There are also some more interesting questions which need to be answered, for example, as children’s use of Internet resources increases, how do their general knowledge skills change? If they’re more reliant on instant access to a variety of information, is there a trade off between broad versus deep knowledge, or specialisation versus generalisation. I.e., being knowledgeable in more fields of knowledge but less knowledgeable of the details of each field, versus knowing more in one field. Do technologies such as advanced search engines change the way people’s brains process information?
Next up, Donald’s theory of the evolution of our culture and mind. After that, his proposal of a hypothetical neural process which is similar to working memory, but which works over a longer time scale, and possibly what gave humans an edge over our primate ancestors.
Related entries:
- How our mind, brain and culture evolved: A proposed theory.
- How do we process complex social interactions?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
