Jen asks us to;

1. Highlight those you’ve read in full
2. Asterisk those you intend to read
3. Add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list
4. Link back to her

I don’t know if I can follow rule 3. I’d really love to read all of them. And even though I intend to read most I probably won’t get through them all. So I’ll just mark the ones that it’s likely I will read.

1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
4. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
6. The Devil’s Doctor, Philip Ball
7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
10. *1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
11. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
17. *Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
20. Vermeer’s Camera, Philip Steadman
21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
23. *Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
24. Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
26. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
27. *Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
30. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
31. E=mc², David Bodanis
32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
36. Apollo’s Fire, Michael Sims
37. Flatland, Edward Abbott
38. Fermat’s Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
39. Stiff, Mary Roach
40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
42. Longitude, Dava Sobel
43. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
48. The Executioner’s Current, Richard Moran
49. Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
50. Pythagorus’ Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
55. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincare’s Maps, Peter Galison
56. *The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
57. *The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
58. *The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
61. *Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
72. Chaos, James Gleick
73. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais
76. Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski
77. Basin and Range, John McPhee
78. Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
79. Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
80. Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson
81. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll
82. *Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Carl Zimmer
83. Genome, Matt Ridley
84. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
85. It Ain’t Necessarily So, Richard Lewontin
86. On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
87. Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran
88. The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins
89. The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth

    Lloyd

90. The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson
91. The Great Devonian Controversy, Martin Rudwick
92. *The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
93. *The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
94. The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment, Richard Lewontin
95. Time, Love, Memory, Jonathan Weiner
96. Voyaging and The Power of Place, Janet Browne
97. Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier

Plus some that I’ve read or want to read which popped up in the comments on PZ’s page or on Jennifer’s page:

98. *The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
99. What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman
100. *The Science of Good and Evil, Michael Shermer
101. *A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, V.S. Ramachandran
102. *The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker
103. *Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett
104. *Collapse, Jared Diamond
105. *”Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,” - Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
106. *Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan
107. *The Third Chimpanze, Jared Diamond
108. *A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
109. Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner
110. Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan
111. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
112. *Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer
113. *The Moral Animal, Robert Wright

And now some additions including a few more good Psychology books.

114. Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
115. Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio
116. Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald
117. Momma and the Meaning of Life, Irvin Yalom
118. Flow, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
119. Happiness, Matthieu Ricard

ShareThis

ShareThis

Atheists do share common beliefs

Some, like Austin Cline in his piece on about.com, do a very good job of explaining why atheism isn’t what many people claim it is. Unfortunately Austin is talking about atheism as a pure concept. He’s not talking about the kind of atheism most atheists actually identify with. He starts by comparing atheism to astigmatism, or metabolism, rightly pointing out that not all “isms” are a set of beliefs. Yet survey a group of atheists and you’ll find that we do have some common beliefs. The obvious rebuttal is that atheism doesn’t require that people hold all those beliefs. And yet of all the arguments against atheism as an ideology I’ve seen, none have accounted for the beliefs atheists actually do share.

Sure, atheism doesn’t require anything other than that you don’t believe in god or gods. Or that you believe gods don’t exist. The problem with this is that when we hold so tightly to a pure definition of atheism and ideology, we ignore the influence atheism has on our lives. We behave like a group of people with a common, social identity. That wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have something more than a lack of a belief to tie us together. No group of people has ever come together because of nothing more than a lack of a particular belief. We do have other common beliefs, as Sam Harris’ survey shows.

Atheism is more than just a definition of a word

Austin Cline says that atheism fails to meet the requirements of an ideology because it doesn’t provide guidance or information. And he’d be right, if atheism was just a word in a dictionary. But it’s not. How could Sam Harris write a manifesto about a concept which lacks the ability to guide? And of course he wasn’t the only one. The truth is an atheist can be confident that other atheists will have a significant number of similar values and beliefs which have (or will) shape their lives in similar ways.

Many atheists argue against religion on the grounds of the many atrocities committed in religion’s name. Yet the counterargument, that religion is not itself responsible for the actions of misguided people, is shot down; if it’s done by religious people, in religion’s name, it’s religion’s fault. In principle that logic is no different from: if it’s atheists, acting under the banner of atheism, then atheism is the guiding force. Yet atheists constantly deny that atheism provides any guiding force. If that’s so, what is it that brings atheists together? Are we really able to accept that we can build these social networks without a common set of beliefs and values? Is there any benefit in getting hung up on exactly which philosophy or ideology those beliefs and values come from?

Atheism isn’t simple. Deal with it.

It would make life a lot easier if concepts like atheism really were as simple as some people say. But the nature of human understanding and human interaction prevents any concept like atheism from being understood in the same way by everyone. We can’t condense everything that atheism means to everyone into one word. Not even a long Wikipedia page is enough.

It’s simply not possible for atheism to be simple.

ShareThis

The University of Pennsylvania is running a few research projects which are open to everyone who might want to participate. For some of the studies (including the one I just signed up for) you may be asked to do some exercises, but for most you’ll just need to fill out some questionnaires. Head over to the site for more details.

ShareThis

ShareThis

Previous research suggests self-affirmation makes it easier for you to accept information which might threaten your sense of self-worth. It was thought that doing something like writing about why your values are important improves self-esteem, and that improvement in self-esteem is what makes hard-to-swallow news more palatable.

Values-affirmation and its affect on positive feelings.

The research done by Jennifer Crocker and her colleagues lead to a different conclusion. In the first of two experiments they had two groups of people rank business, art, social life, science, religion and politics in the order of which they valued most to least. One group then wrote about why their most important value was important to them, while the other wrote about why their least important value might be important to other people. The first group is the experimental group, the second the control group. Afterwards both groups rated their current experience of 18 different feelings, including loving, strong, humble, ashamed, weak, and inferior.

The results showed that feelings of love increased regardless of which value the person rated as important. In other words, out of everyone who rated social life as the most important value, those who wrote about why it was important to them (the experimental group) felt more loving than those who wrote about why a less important value might be important to others (the control group). The researchers reported that the same applied for all the other values.

The thing that caught my eye was that those who rated science as their most important value felt less love than all the rest, and that the difference between those who wrote about their important value versus other people’s was slightly less likely to be replicated if the experiment were done again (though still much higher than chance). Also, there wasn’t a big difference between those in the control group who ranked social life and religion as most important, compared to those in the experimental group who ranked science as their most important.

This raises a question which the study didn’t seem to address; how does a particular value influence particular feelings? The results showed that writing about your most important value did increase a range of positive feelings, but it didn’t show how the feelings of people with different values changed, except for the feeling of love, which arguably was affected a little differently when the most important value was science.

It would have been useful to see how each individual’s feelings changed before and after the task. The experiments only compared different groups of people after the task; it didn’t see what kind of changes there were for people within each group. If, for example, the small number of people who valued science highly just happened to be split into one group who were already more loving versus those who were already slightly less, then it would appear as if the task itself lead to an increase in loving feelings, whereas the truth is the differences where already there before the task.

That probably isn’t the case for people whose most important value was something other than science, since for them there was a big difference between the tasks. Also, there were more people in those groups which means it’s less likely that the differences were a result of which group the people happened to end up in.

Transcending the self.

Still, that question doesn’t really affect the researchers’ conclusions. And that was only half of the study. The other half looked at how writing about your values can affect how well you accept information which might threaten some aspect of your self-worth. A different group of participants did the same tasks as in the first experiment, but they were also shown some fake research about how smoking increases risk for a specific, dangerous medical issue. Some participants were smokers and some weren’t; the results showed those who smoked were more accepting of the fake research if they wrote about their most important value.

The researchers suggested that affirming your values allows you to “transcend the self”; not in a metaphysical sense, but by shifting your focus away from potential personal threat to the other things you care about (including people, of course).

No hand-waving advice for me, thanks.

Lots of people have been saying the same thing for a long time. Especially spiritual leaders and authors of self-help books. Perhaps that’s why most other research on this topic has produced different conclusions; scientists don’t tend to hold the advice of self-proclaimed experts in high regard. And there’s good reason for this; those who promote a solely personal-experience-based way of figuring out if something works have never, as far as I’m aware, given advice in anything but a very broad sense. It’s as if you asked someone how you could find Mars in the night sky, and they told you to look up. But clearly scientists can learn something from the musings of those who are less precise, even if it’s only an obvious answer their tight focus has blinded them to. I hope it’s something people take on board, especially those involved in research which falls under the relatively new category of Positive Psychology. An idea which comes from an unexpected source might still be a good idea.

Another reason for being cautious of accepting anecdotal evidence is that it’s hard to figure out if what was claimed to work really did have an effect. And if it did, would it work as well for someone else? That’s an extremely important consideration when you’re in the business of giving advice; the more accurately you can tailor the advice to a particular person, the more likely they are to accept that advice, and the more likely it is that advice will be effective. This research shows that affirmation of your most important value will make it easier to accept advice you might otherwise not. But perhaps those who value science would achieve a better result through some other task. As the researchers mentioned, different activities might affect different aspects of a person in different ways, and more research will help us figure that out.

Related entries:

• Belief Colourblindness
• An interesting and fun way to explain the nature of science
• Do you really want to know the Truth?

ShareThis

Lots of you might think at this point, “That’s great, but I’m going to run a business/become a pro sportsperson/become an artist/do something else that doesn’t require a lot of specialised education, why should I care so much about science?” And you’d be right, to a degree. You certainly can get far in this world without a lot of higher education, or, with a bit of effort, possibly not much more than a basic first six years of schooling (or something equivalent). But in today’s world, if you don’t understand the basic concepts of science, i.e., what science is and what it isn’t, then you’re likely to miss out on a lot that this world has to offer.

So what is science?

At its core, science is a collection of knowledge, and methods of gathering that collection. Science is what you do when you try to figure out, as accurately as possible, what caused something you’ve observed. Those observations can be of human behaviour and culture; the social sciences (e.g., psychology and anthropology). Or we can observe everything else in the world, as it done in the natural sciences (e.g., physics and chemistry)². The terms “hard” and “soft” are also often used to refer to natural vs. social sciences, but in either case observations are made, and then hypotheses are formed. A hypothesis is a tentative but carefully considered attempt at explaining the observations. Scientists then put those hypotheses to the test, over and over again. A test might take the form of a structured experiment, or a study in a natural environment. In both cases the research is designed to eliminate any factors which might affect the results in important but disruptive ways. Ways which might prevent accurate interpretation of the results. For example if a researcher wanted to find out if a new education program was effective, it would be necessary to make sure the children included in the study aren’t all more intelligent than other children who might be included in the program in the future. Otherwise it would seem as if the program was effective when in reality those particular children could probably do well in any educational program. In other words, it would look like the educational program worked really well, but ultimately the children who took part in the program were just smarter than average.

The process of observation, hypothesis formation, and repeated testing forms the core of the scientific method. If the tests support the hypothesis then we can say there’s evidence that the hypothesis is valid, but that doesn’t mean the hypothesis has been proven! New evidence might one day show that, under circumstances which the scientists weren’t able to foresee, the hypothesis was wrong. That means it’s possible to show that a hypothesis is false but it’s not possible to show that a hypothesis will be 100% correct under all possible circumstances for all time. Fortunately it’s not necessary for a hypothesis to be true no matter what. You just have to show that you’ve accounted for all relevant observations, and that the conclusion you reach fits into the collection of knowledge we’ve already gathered. Once you reach that point you can build some of those well-supported hypotheses into a framework which provides a holistic explanation of a specific aspect of the universe. That framework is called a scientific theory. So you can see that a scientific theory is a solid framework of knowledge about a specific aspect of the world which has been put to (and withstood) repeated, thorough investigation. If a scientific theory were a physical thing it would be like a bridge constructed out of the strongest material currently available, built according to strict engineering principles to ensure its safety, and even still it would be evaluated regularly to make sure it stands up to the test of time.

Science applies to everything we can observe.

Since science deals with human behaviour and culture, as well as everything else within the natural world, as long as it can be observed it can be the focus of scientific study. This has historically been a bit of a problem (note: understatement) for various forms of religion as the leaders of those religions have considered many subjects which came under scientific scrutiny to be unquestionable. Thankfully not all followers of any religion accepted the tenets of their faith wholly without question, but enough did, and continue to do so, to create the perception that there are some things in this world which science simply can’t touch. Unfortunately this perception all too often extends to concepts which science does have some explanation for. Like music.

Maybe this is understandable, since non-physical entities supposedly influence the physical world (an obvious example is a soul), and so it might seem reasonable to believe that some natural concepts are a result of non-physical influences. Love, beauty, appreciation of music, goodness, morality; these are all concepts which have at some time or another been said to have a source in a spiritual realm, and that realm is said to be beyond the reach of science. I don’t believe that’s true, but for the sake of argument I’ll assume for a moment that it is true. So what we have is something (spirit, God, some other entity) which exists but is not physical. Those entities are able to influence things in the physical world. If that’s the case, that influence will be observable by scientific means. Perhaps not today with our current level of understanding and technology, but as long as it exists in the natural world, and to affect the natural world it must, at least partially, then its observation under scientific conditions is possible.

Science helps reveal what’s exciting, interesting, and beautiful in the world.

The last paragraph would probably make a lot of people upset. That’s usually the case when firmly held beliefs are challenged. Part of the reason for being upset might be the belief that part of what makes this world wonderful is the mystery and awe inherent in our existence, and science seems to take away that mystery and awe, turning beautiful things like art into something boring and mundane. In response to this perception a man much much wiser than me said:

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people - and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There’s beauty not just at the dimension of one centimeter; there’s also beauty at a smaller dimension.

There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. The fact that the colors of the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does his aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

- Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Another wiser man said:

There has been a lot of respect shown for mystery lately, but there has been a serious mistake in understanding what it is. Mystery is not, as people would have it, an ignorance of the world. Or more accurately, it is not just an ignorance. What mystery is instead is the permission to discover things on your own.

Contrary to being an ode to ignorance, the appreciation of mystery involves the realization just how much a person could discover. Mystery is a catalyst of action, inviting investigation and analysis, not a passive reception of the unknown. A good mystery novel is not a discussion about ignorance; it’s an adventure detailing how a person acquires knowledge.

-Michael Chui

Science is a tool

And as such it can be used to our benefit, or to our detriment; it’s entirely up to us. It’s possible that the products of science, i.e., technology, will again cause us harm as they have done in the past. The advantage of science, and the quality which helps ensure we don’t use it to cause ourselves harm, is that science admits fault where appropriate. Science doesn’t try to say a round hole is square, and then, after placing a square peg against the hole, proceed to hammer it in. That’s possible, science does provide the means, but someone has to wield that hammer. Science requires that if you see that the peg doesn’t fit, you say it doesn’t fit. And then perhaps reshape either the hole or the peg, or find another peg or another hole, or whatever is most appropriate.

As a product of fallible humans, our practice and application of science is fallible as well. That’s why it’s very important that we continue to question science, and to test the validity of the conclusions other scientists have reached. But it’s equally important to know where to focus our efforts, to ask the questions and perform the tests which have a chance of producing results, for better or worse. Someone whose hardest climb has been walking up a hill to the nearby shopping centre, wouldn’t immediately set out to prove they can climb Mt. Everest. Likewise, someone like me who doesn’t know much about quantum electrodynamics, shouldn’t immediately set out to show that the LHC will destroy the world (more learned people on the other hand… But others have shown there’s little cause for concern).

So how do I learn more?

You don’t have to go to university and study for years and years, emerge with a PhD, then perform many more years of research before you’ll be qualified to grasp the latest science. Even today anyone with even a basic level of education and access to the Internet has a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips. The basics of science are out there for all.

There’s also Real Science, which makes the latest scientific research accessible to anyone from the age of around 11 up. Real Science presents science news stories based on recent research, including links which elaborate on the concepts the story mentions, but most importantly provides immediate explanations of potentially difficult words in an unobtrusive way, so anyone reading doesn’t have to keep a dictionary on hand (which might not even have a good definition of some of the more ambiguous or distinctive terms). Sometimes I wonder if I should do the same.

In the end, as long as you really want to be a part of this highly connected, ever shrinking, information driven society, having a solid understanding of at least the basics of science is essential, and there’s nothing stopping you from getting it.

Related posts:

• Coturnix on teaching science
• Progress doesn’t have to be dangerous
• Do you really want to know the Truth?
• Science and spirituality are not incompatible
• Belief Colourblindness
• The Resistance to and Misunderstanding of Science

ShareThis

Encephalon 49 is up, hosted by Marc over at Neuroscientifically Challenged.

Included is a great post on Mind Hacks bringing to light the need for not only the media to understand what brain imaging (particularly fMRI) can and can’t tell us, but scientists themselves too. I was pleased to find a succinct run-down of a paper I just finished reading and was going to write about. Go read Vaughan’s post instead. And then check out The Neurocritic’s post which discusses the same paper and then takes Science to task.

There’s a hell of a lot more so go check it out!

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Encephalon, so I highly recommend heading over to Sharp Brains for more.

ShareThis

What is the cognitive element, missing in primates, that has enabled human beings to master so complex a social life?

Donald suggests that what’s missing may be the ability to mentally handle the vast intricacies humans deal with on a daily basis (and we do so mostly without being aware of it). He says that our current models of cognition focus mainly on short-term processes, and that little is known about the mechanisms for dealing with complex social interactions in the long-term. He points out that studies of neural activity have dealt with what goes on when there’s a reaction to an immediate stimulus, like neurons connected to your eye firing when you see a light flash. This kind of activity only lasts mere seconds at most. Studies have also dealt with short-term or working memory. This type of neural activity is self-maintaining (i.e., it doesn’t need a stimulus to keep it going, like the kind I mentioned just before would), and which can last for many more seconds (or even minutes). Finally, research has looked into long-term memory and found it to be more like an inactive storage, only truly coming into play when awareness is directed towards it, at which point it becomes activity in working memory.

But between the short-term and long-term is where he says we spend most of our mental life, in an

‘‘intermediate time zone”, within which many events and episodes are grasped and understood in terms of their implications for social relationships and future behavior.

He suggests that processing of events within an intermediate time zone could be handled by a “slow process.” This slow process can operate over longer time frames than working memory, though there is some overlap. It’s also active, maintaining control of our thoughts and behaviour while monitoring and withstanding potential interruptions. He argues that this kind of mental activity must take place, since there’s overwhelming evidence that our daily life involves relatively long thought processes. He gives the examples of conversations that last hours, and organised games.

But I wonder if the slow process is really just another way of describing processes that we already have a fair understanding of. Donald says that research into attention has focused on processes that occur from moment to moment, i.e., what happens when we attend to something happening right now. However in my (admittedly limited) understanding, activities such as long conversations and organised games involve continual feedback, which could exist as continually updated activity in working memory. I know that I can easily lose track of a conversation if I “drift off” for a few seconds; in other words there isn’t really an active process keeping track of what’s going on beyond a span of a few minutes.

And yet if I have a long conversation early in the day, even if I don’t think about it for a few more hours, later I find the subject matter of the conversation easier to recall than I otherwise would. For example, if I was talking about a relative I don’t often think about, I’ll be able to recall information about that relative more easily even hours after the conversation. Does this suggest that my memory of that relative exists as ongoing neural activity in a form which lasts longer than working memory supposedly can?

Could the processes of long-term memory consolidation explain the “slow process”? Again, in my limited understanding, long-term memory consolidation is a process which takes place over hours, days, and perhaps weeks. And the results seem to last much longer. Also, the process occurs when first learning something, but also when recalling a specific piece of information. I.e., when I find out the details of a friend’s latest fling I’ll probably think about other flings they’ve had in the past, and the memory of those distant events will be reconsolidated. Could it be that consolidation is the slow process, and that , for example, a conversation I had early in the day is more readily accessible later in the day because of the ongoing process of consolidation?

I’m still learning about these processes so I wouldn’t dare propose any firm conclusions, but it seems that the combination of the processes involved in attention and consolidation of memories may account for

the maintenance of something as complex and subtle as a very slow moving social scenario or mental plan, running in the deep background, enduring for many hours, and influencing a whole succession of actions and changes of strategy.

I’ll continue to scour the available research for answers, but if anyone has any at hand, I’d love to hear them.

Related entries:

• How did our mind and brain evolve?
• How our mind, brain and culture evolved: A proposed theory.

ShareThis

It’s a theory which drew on the work of people from many fields including neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and comparative biology. The crux of the theory is that our cognitive-cultural evolution went through three transitions; each new stage involving a new way of mentally representing reality. It’s important to note that each stage builds on top of the previous, retaining all the advantages so that the last stage also includes all the previous ones.

Episodic Culture

This stage involved the ability to mentally represent complex events, including social ones, but with a very limited capacity to voluntarily express those representations. And while complex events could be understood, they could only be understood in a very situation-specific way. Modern apes are at this stage¹. An example of the limitations of this stage can be found in apes’ use of sign language. Apes can be taught how to sign, but they seem to only be able to use signs in the contexts in which they’re taught. However, humans can learn to apply the same sign in any context in which it could conceivably be relevant (and even when not relevant. Just think of how we’re coming up with new uses for old words all the time).

Mimetic Culture

The first transition brings us to a mimetic form of culture. It happened about 2 million years ago with the emergence of Homo erectus, who were the first of our ancestors to show clear evidence of an advanced, tool-using society. While some who came before do show evidence of tool-use, it wasn’t as systematic and widespread as it was with Homo erectus. Donald argues that our ancestors must have undergone a significant evolutionary adaptation at around that time, citing various sources as evidence including fossil records, cultural relics such as tools, and comparative anatomical evidence. The result of the adaptation was a form of representation which included the ability to model actions. This form of culture gets it name from that modeling ability; mimetic skill, or mimesis, which is the ability to consciously act in a way which conveys a message. Donald suggests that our ancestors still weren’t able to communicate verbally, but they now possessed enough nonverbal ability to allow individuals to share their knowledge of skills, such as tool-making, through various forms of behaviour including gestures, whole-body movement, facial expressions, eye movements, etc.

Mythic Culture

The second adaptation happened less than 400,000 years ago with the emergence of Homo sapiens, our closest ancestors. The adaptation was the ability to speak (and of course understand speech). This stage involved many cultural achievements including clothing, building shelter, transporting heaving objects, a huge variety of tools and weapons, social and religious activities involving elaborate rituals including dancing, masks and costumes. It was the latter achievement from which this form of culture gets its name; our ancestors could now form an understanding of the world which integrated everything that they experienced into a narrative form. They could construct and communicate those stories far more effectively than they could before, not just because of the advantages speech provide, but also because of the improvements to memory and thinking that came along with speech.

Theoretic Culture

The third, and to this point the last (though not necessarily the final) transition was not a biological one. It involved the use of tools to get our representations out of our heads, allowing us to manipulate them in more ways than ever possible before. By moving our ideas outside our heads those concrete representations became part of our cognitive processes. Our “thoughts” now also exist in various forms of written language, but also as every other kind of representation that technology allows, from graphs to photos to video, as well as music and other forms accessible to our other senses. Most importantly, along with this new form or representation came a new form of thinking; theoretical thought. This form of thought allows a much greater scrutiny of reality, and much more accurate representations than were possible at previous stages.

So there you have a brief outline of Donald’s proposed theory. It’s important because it provides a framework for understanding and further examining our current culture and cognition, the various ways in which we view the world, how that differs from culture to culture, and what might change in the future as our culture continues to develop. If you’d like to learn more I highly recommend picking up Origins of the Modern Mind.

Related entries:

• How did our mind and brain evolve?
• How do we process complex social interactions?

ShareThis