Précis ofOrigins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition

1993 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merlin Donald
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Storage Devices ◽  
Culture And Cognition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture.

A Model for Mind-Device Dialectic and the Future of Advertising in the Social Media Age

2018 ◽  
pp. 735-751
Author(s):  
Recep Yilmaz ◽  
Nurdan Oncel Taskiran
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Water Mill ◽  
The Way

Every advertisement text has a specific impact on the mind of receivers. Just like a water-mill or wind mill, human mind develops a specific systematic interaction against different advertisement texts. This section focuses on how information presented and carried by different texts are built on human mind. The basic aim is to reveal how advertisement texts operate human mind. In this sense, the authors try to understand the impact of analogue media on our minds through discussing the nature of science, the way human mind operates, and the structure of mass communication means. On top of that, the authors visualize this interaction on a model. This model would not only make it possible for us to understand our interaction with analogue media but also would give clues about digital media. With these clues, it would be possible to make predictions about changing advertising environment, and accordingly the way of making more effective strategies and future of advertising sector.

A Model for Mind-Device Dialectic and the Future of Advertising in the Social Media Age

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Recep Yılmaz ◽  
Nurdan Oncel Taskiran
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Water Mill ◽  
The Way

Every advertisement text has a specific impact on the mind of receivers. Just like a water-mill or wind mill, human mind develops a specific systematic interaction against different advertisement texts. This section focuses on how information presented and carried by different texts are built on human mind. The basic aim is to reveal how advertisement texts operate human mind. In this sense, the authors try to understand the impact of analogue media on our minds through discussing the nature of science, the way human mind operates, and the structure of mass communication means. On top of that, the authors visualize this interaction on a model. This model would not only make it possible for us to understand our interaction with analogue media but also would give clues about digital media. With these clues, it would be possible to make predictions about changing advertising environment, and accordingly the way of making more effective strategies and future of advertising sector.

Education and cosmopolitanism: Liberating our non-cosmopolitan minds through mindfulness

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 610-627
Author(s):  
Oren Ergas
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Social Narratives ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemplative Studies ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Feeling At Home ◽  
Person Experience

This paper locates the main challenge for education in cosmopolitanism within the nature of education when interpreted as a “mind-making process.” Based on this interpretation, education is currently a process that shapes non-cosmopolitan minds, for the practices generally associated with it habituate the human mind to see “reality” through contingent social narratives. The aspiration of education in cosmopolitanism to cultivate “a sense of feeling at home and caring for the world,” requires practices that also liberate the mind from the contingencies of the social narratives into which it happens to be born. For such purpose, education requires an ethical meta-narrative, which applies to all human beings and appeals to a mutual human language. Following calls for embracing a pluralistic epistemology in policy making, this paper proposes the interdisciplinary field of contemplative studies that focuses on the understanding of the embodied mind, as a point of origin for considering education as such and education in cosmopolitanism in particular. Mindfulness is then interpreted as one possible practical pedagogy based on which we can practice detachment from the contingency of social narratives by cultivating grounded-ness in the non-contingency of pre-conceptual embodied first-person experience.

Physics and Politics

1946 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-457
Author(s):  
Charles E. Merriam
Keyword(s):  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
The Real ◽  
Explosive Force ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

The Atomic Bomb. In 1869, Walter Bagehot wrote an interesting volume entitled Physics and Politics. Today we look again at this topic, but in a new and blinding light. The atomic bomb is an index of dynamic and revolutionary changes, the end of which is not in sight, and which I do not have the temerity to forecast. Even before the bomb was made, there were revolutionary changes on the way. We were on notice that physics, biochemistry, psychology, medicine, were bursting with possibilities which staggered the imagination of the most starry-eyed. This was before the bomb was dropped. Now we know that we were on the beam. We are now confronted by revolution, dimming in meaning all human revolutions rolled into one.First of all, the meaning of controlled atomic energies is often wholly misunderstood. The real marvel is not that these vast forces exist, but that they are found and harnessed by the human mind. The real explosive force is that of the mind that unleashed these giants and made them available for the service of mankind. The mind is king, not the atom. We trapped the atom; we have mastered some secrets of its latent forces, not by accident, but by deliberate design, by organization and ingenuity. We may marvel at the display of physical force, but the deeper force of mind made this triumph possible, and will bring still greater triumphs as we move along through eras of discovery and invention.

Fugitive Figures

2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Mary Franklin-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Gilbert Simondon ◽  
The Way

Abstract Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.

Hausa Poems as Sources for Social and Economic History, II

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 97-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. B. Duffill
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Subjective Evaluation ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western European ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

In the following commentary on three Hausa poems presented in Part I of this essay, I attempt to analyze each poem, paying greatest attention to Wakar Talauci da Wadata. First I take up the matter of the dating of the poem from internal evidence and follow that with some general observations on the problems and methods involved in the analysis. The detailed commentary on Wakar Talauci da Wadata follows, divided into four sections: an examination of the objective conditions of poverty and wealth as they are presented in the poem; a discussion of the subjective evaluation of the condition of poverty and the condition of wealth, as Darho observed it among the Hausa; an examination of the way in which women are represented in the poem; and a discussion of the proposition that there are contradictions in the poem itself and in the social position of the poet. After discussing Wakar Madugu Yahaya and Wakar Abinda, I try to place Wakar Talauci da Wadata in the comparative context of several Western European literary products and one Arabic. The object of this excursus is to show that in the literature of other cultures, more or less distant in both time and space, there have been concerns and preoccupations that are essentially the same as those that occupied the mind of Darho.Unlike the 1903 version of the poem used by Pilaszewicz and Tahir/Goody, the version from the Mischlich collection is undated, but there is internal evidence to suggest that the poem was composed no earlier than 1874/75 and probably between 1896 and 1910.

Computer modeling, complex biological systems, and their simplifications

1980 ◽  
Vol 239 (1) ◽  
pp. R1-R6
Author(s):  
D. Garfinkel
Keyword(s):  
Biological System ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complex Nonlinear Systems ◽  
The Mind

The amount of information defining a biological system, as specified in its genome, is vastly larger than the amount of information the human mind can handle simultaneously in its short-term memory (7 +/- 2 items at most). In such a situation the mind tends to simplify, linearize, and consider only a few of many variables that may be involved. This may be limiting when an experimenter interprets his own experiments without help from theory or modeling as is common in biology. The Michaelis-Menten model, which is very useful although not necessarily valid, and its linearizations are described as an example of this. The social processes and obligations involved in simplifying complex situations are discussed. Computer simulation provides a method for investigating complex nonlinear systems that does not require excessive simplification of the biological system being studied and whose economics are becoming steadily more favorable.

scholarly journals The Mind of the Political and Social Animal

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nerijus Stasiulis
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mind

In this article I present the outline of Filosofija. Sociogija 30(3) the articles of which I see as mainly centering around the issue of Man as placed and interacting within social, cultural and political contexts. However, the discussion of the social or political is generally nourished by metaphysical or epistemological issues or insights. The human mind deals with the fundamental questions concerning human nature, the existence or the metaphysical structure of the world, the status of cognition in general and science/ technology in particular. The articles merge into a choir signalling the inescapably social and political mode of our consciousness.

scholarly journals Harmonization of the Human Heart, Mind and Hand

Illuminatio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-161
Author(s):  
Mustafa Cerić
Keyword(s):  
Human Heart ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

The focus of this article is a reflection on the nature of the human heart (al-qalb), human mind (al-‘aql) and human hand (al-yad). The heart is the place of emotion - love or hate; the mind is the place of thought - right or wrong; the hand is the tool of power – justice or injustice. So, the question may be asked, what is the tipping scale for the heart from love to hate; what makes the mind to think right or wrong; and what causes the hand to do justice or injustice? Then, what is the role of faith/religion in harmonizing the human heart, mind and hand? How can the Sīrah, the way of the life of the messenger of God, teach the human heart to love, the human mind to thing right and the human hand to act justly? What can man learn from the parallel lives and trials of the early aṣḥāb, the Prophet’s companions, and their immediate tābi’ūn, the followers? Here, the article introduces the way of life of two aṣḥāb: ‘Abdullah ibn ‘Abbās and Mu‘ādh ibn Jabal and one tābi‘un: Al-Qāḍī Shuraikh ibn Al-Ḥārith Al-Kindī, to show that the heart is not a pump that drives the blood, but it is the blood of love that drives the heart to love; that the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but the light to be kindled; and that the hand is not a tool to be abused, but a means to be used for justice. The author aims to open the way for a critique of the pure faith of Muslims. Indeed, the Muslims need to examine their faith in a serious way to find out the right exit from the current crisis of the relationship between their heart, mind and hand. Where is the pure faith of Muslims? Is it in their heart only? Is it in their mind only? Is it in their hand only? How can the Muslims connect these three into a coherent whole for the good of humanity? The good examples from the Sīrah might provide us with the right answer to these questions provided that the Muslims open their hearts, employ their minds and educate their hands. This article is trying to guide them to that direction.

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