Origins of the Modern Mind
* Book: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. By Merlin Donald. Harvard University Press, 1991
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Description
Trevor Stone:
"Donald spends the first quarter of Origins presenting an impressive collection of neurological, anthropological, and psychological information about the human brain and cognition and how it differs from those of other primates. This portion of the book culminates in a picture of primate memory, and hence cognition, as episodic. The only representational form of memory available to non-human primates, Donald shows, is the memory of specific events. Primate cognition thus consists in recalling specific past events and categorical judgments and applying them straightforwardly to present circumstances. They are able to use symbols by recalling their use in the past, but they are incapable of representational generation. In primate culture, information like tool use is spread by direct and literal imitation and new ideas are hard to come by.
Donald then proposes that Homo erectus underwent a fundamental cognitive shift that set them apart from all other primates, including Australiopithecus and Homo habilis. Erectus developed sophisticated tools, spread across vast territory and varied climates, and developed "society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species' survival strategy." (p. 163) These advances were made possible not because of a simple increase in total brain mass, but through a radical new cognitive capability -- mimesis. Donald argues that while erectus couldn't speak, they had a generative intentional representational form of communication available in gestures and mime. Mimetic culture allowed our ancestors to model group structure, moving from relationships between individuals to relationships between social roles; establish group norms; voluntarily display emotion; coordinate hunting, allowing some hunters to drive the animal to an appropriate spot and others to attack it; and easily teach skills like tool-making. Knowledge was no longer passed purely through genes and memory of life events; erectus could pass hard-won knowledge like "don't eat these berries" directly to friends and family. Learning and reinforcement took the form of direct instruction, reciprocal games, and group ritual, "a collective act in which individuals play different roles" (p. 175).
Donald illustrates several of the ways in which mimesis still permeates modern human cognition. Pre-verbal children, deaf-mutes without sign language, and some people with brain damage are all able to communicate fairly effectively using only mime, gestures, facial expressions, and prosodic vocalizations. Group ritual (and its theatrical descendants) remains a crucial part of present-day hunting-gathering culture and even plays a role in modern western culture. Furthermore, mimetic action is more effective at conveying emotion, maintaining crowd control, and teaching certain tasks than language. Human mimetic skill has thus been retained vestigially, just as the mimetic adaptation retained and encapsulated our episodic memory capacity.
The second transition of human cognition that Donald presents is from mimetic culture to mythic culture. Mimesis could only take hominid culture so far, and language developed to allow for more precise, better developed, and better conveyed communication between individuals. Continuing his careful and critical examination of archaeological, neurological, psychological, and linguistic evidence, Donald states that intraspecies competition provided the selection pressure for the language adaptation. But social communication wasn't the only benefit of language. Just as mimesis offered people a memory and cognitive structure vastly better than that possessed in purely episodic culture, semantic symbolism offered a similar boon to the members of "oral-semiotic" culture. Lexical capacity, the root of semantics, doesn't depend on speech, and we therefore possess "a general-purpose capacity that extends beyond the vocal-auditory pathway" (p. 254).
Donald proposes that myth is the primary function of language in a culture dominated by linguistic cognition, which he therefore labels "mythic culture." Donald suggests that mythic cultures passed (and continue to pass) collective knowledge about survival through a vast mythic heritage, complete with oral lore, totemic art, and mimetic song, dance, and ritual. The fundamental (in terms of importance and function) aspects of linguistics thus reside at the narrative level, rather than at the level of the sentence and proposition, the primary focus of linguists. Although Dunbar's commentary proposes that basic social exchange, not myth, was the primary function of language, the primacy of narrative rather than syntax remains.
Just as the mimetic mental system can access the memories, conclusions, and abilities of the episodic, the linguistic center has access to the other two cognitive modes. We can thus linguistically present (though often not very clearly) information and skills we have learned by mimesis or direct experience. However, the mimetic system, Donald thinks, cannot access the internals of the linguistic system, nor can the episodic system access either of the others. Donald's presentation of Brother John, an epileptic who would lose access to internal and external linguistic skill, throws doubt on this flow -- during his episodic- and mimetic-only spells, he was able to act on information obtained during his lifetime of linguistic learning and interact within linguistically-based culture.
Also present in mythic culture, though appearing much later than Donald places speech, are symbolic pictures like those found in southern European caves. Donald argues that these hunting and fertility images were used "to explore and develop the mythic ideas that were already the governing cognitive constructs of human society" (p. 282). Symbolic art, in Donald's view, is handled by the same cognitive system that handles symbolic language, although he clearly shows that language and visual processing take place in separate places in the brain. Humans would later synthesize symbolic art and symbolic language, the third transition proposed by Donald.
The key new feature in the fourth stage of human cognition is writing. While words and semantic symbolic communication are tens if not hundreds of thousands of years old, only within the last 8,000 years or so have people systematically recorded them in external media. Beginning with cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and ideograms, human memory was no longer restricted to the bounds of the body, but could now be held in "external storage systems." The cognitive changes accompanying this memory change include the emergence of information retrieval knowledge as more important than rote memorization and the ability to overcome working memory limitations in thought processes using an "external memory field." The ability to critically examine, piece by piece, exact writings led to the rise of "theoretic culture" -- science, philosophy, and other deep investigations into the nature of the world."
9https://trevorstone.org/school/donaldreview.html)
Review
Trevor Stone:
"In his 1991 book Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Merlin Donald presents the evolution of human cognition as a sequence of three transitions in dominant representational systems. Humans progressed from other primates by developing gestural, linguistic, and written storage and thought structures, thereby developing what Donald calls "mimetic," "mythic," and "theoretic" cultures. His approach is interdisciplinary and somewhat speculative -- he combines data from anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neurobiology to reconstruct the stages of evolutionary human cognitive development.
After a decade replete with evolutionary accounts of human cognitive capacity, Donald wrote A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, arguing for the presence of a strong consciousness as one of the most important attributes of the human mind. Noting that a full account of human consciousness stands many years in the future, Donald sets out to describe what he can of the architecture, capabilities, and evolution of human consciousness. The result is a picture of a highly plastic domain-general capacity that can coordinate action, focus attention, and regulate activity, all typically in intermediate-term time frames. After ten years, Donald still holds the views expressed in Origins, and he ties the two books together at the end of AMSR.'
(https://trevorstone.org/school/donaldreview.html)
More information
* Book: Merlin Donald. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness.