August 02, 2008
Constraining the ancient mind:
As part of Seed Magazine's on innovative thinkers in science, they published a podcast interview with archaeologist Lambros Malafouris who is pioneering the study of ancient cultural artefacts as a way of constraining theories in evolutionary psychology.
One of the criticisms of some evolutionary psychology is that it too often involves over-interpretation and 'just so' stories - explanations of why we have certain psychological attributes that are stories rather than hypotheses that can be easily tested.
Malafouris has taken the novel approach of using the findings from archaeology to systematically generate and test theories of the evolution of the mind. He seems particularly interested in embodied cognition, the idea that the mind can only be understood in relation to how it interacts with the world through body and action.
The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man's stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?" he says. "You might see the stick as something external, but it plays a very important role in the perceptual system of this person. It extends the boundaries of this human—the stick becomes an integral part of the cognitive architecture."
If material culture is an extension of human cognition, our engagement with it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence, Malafouris argues. For example, ancient clay tablets that allowed people to actually write down records were not mere objects, he says. Instead, they became integral adjuncts of the human memory system. The invention of such a technology "changes the structure of the human mind," says Malafouris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Rather than happening wholly in the head, he argues, cognition develops and evolves through the interplay between intelligence and material culture.
In fact, there's an increasing focus on related ideas. Some of my favourite studies have been done by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found numerous effects of tool use on thinking and perception.
One of my favourite studies is where he found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.
Malafouris is using these ideas and adds to the relatively new but exciting field of cognitive archaeology.
Link to Seed interview with Lambros Malafouris.
