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The Mind's Big Bang Only 50,000
Years Ago
We all
assume that bigger brains are better, yet our ancestors went through
several million-year-long periods when toolmaking techniques didn't
improve, despite a lot of brain size increase. Even after our species,
Homo sapiens, was walking around Africa 162,000 years ago, we spent the
next 100,000 years doing more of the same.
But gradually getting more clever is NOT what the 2.5 million year
bigger-brain increase was all about. If those ancestors were getting
better and better (maybe for something that doesn't show in the
archeological record such as short-sentence protolanguage or more
extensive sharing), it didn't feed back to improve toolmaking,
long-distance trade, or even using bone as raw material for toolmaking
(surely the handy-to-hand raw material at any campsite). Oops.
The burst of creativity (since maybe 75,000 to 50,000 years ago) is what
we moderns associate with intelligence and our kind of consciousness.
It's probably the emergence of the suite of higher intellectual
functions: syntax, multi-stage planning, structured music, chains of
logic, games with arbitrary rules, and our fondness for discovering
hidden patterns (the search for coherence). It's likely that they share
some neural machinery for handling structure and judging coherence.
If you can't speak sentences of more than 2-3 words at a time without
them all blending together like a summer drink, you likely cannot think
complicated thoughts either -- where you also have to resolve the
ambiguities and improve the quality of the ensemble offline. That takes
an ability to structure thoughts, what you also need to speak long
sentences or recursively nest clauses. ("I think I saw him leave to go
home.") And without quality bootstrapping aiding structuring, you can't
be a poet who creates ensembles where every word resonates with the
rest, just so.
So
the big brain is not all about intellect. What happened to
reorganize the brain after 100,000 years at its present size, to make it
more creative and versatile, back during the middle of the most recent
ice age?
The Virtual Index for my books and articles,
far better than my printed index in most cases:
And my favorite source for looking up
other authors' books (and who has quoted them):
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A Brief History
of the Mind, 2004
A Brain for All Seasons
2002
Lingua ex Machina
2000
The Cerebral Code
1996
How Brains Think
1996
Conversations with
Neil's Brain
1994 |
