The Social Brain and the Distributed Mind

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Dunbar ◽  
Clive Gamble ◽  
John Gowlett
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed System ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Human Brains ◽  
Chimpanzee Lineage

Human nature is the product of a long history that has brought us, over the course of some 6–8 million years, from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee lineage to modern humans. The aim of this particular volume has been to bring together two powerful approaches that deal, respectively, with explanations of the evolution of human brains and understandings of cognition as a distributed system, in order to illuminate the changes that took place during the later stages of human evolution. It aims to compare inter-disciplinary perspectives on these key issues across a range of disciplines. A particular focus is provided by consideration of the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost 3 million years of artefact and tool use and manufacture provide the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, and social networks.

Social Brain, Distributed Mind

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Small World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Hominin Evolution ◽  
Language Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spatially Distributed

To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition — the social brain — in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches — the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool use provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during the course of hominin evolution, increasingly large spatially distributed communities created stresses that threatened social cohesion. This volume offers the possibility of new insights into the evolution of human cognition and social lives that will further our understanding of the relationship between mind and world.

Technologies of Séparation and the Evolution of Social Extension

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Internal Model ◽  
Global Distribution ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Model ◽  
The Mind

Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

Small Worlds, Material Culture and Ancient Near Eastern Social Networks

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Coward
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agricultural Societies

The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. The discussion presents the results of a focused study of the long-term development of regional social networks in the Near East, using the distribution of different forms of material culture as a proxy for the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices.

The Social Brain and the Shape of the Palaeolithic

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Gamble ◽  
John Gowlett ◽  
Robin Dunbar
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Evolutionary Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biological Mechanisms ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Problems

It is often the case in interdisciplinary accounts of human evolution that archaeological data are either ignored or treated superficially. This article sets out to redress this position by using archaeological evidence from the last 2.5 million years to test the social brain hypothesis (SBH) – that our social lives drove encephalization. To do this we construct a map of our evolving social complexity that concentrates on two resources – materials and emotions – that lie at the basis of all social interaction. In particular, novel cultural and biological mechanisms are seen as evolutionary responses to problems of cognitive load arising from the need to integrate more individuals and sub-units into the larger communities predicted by the SBH. The Palaeolithic evidence for the amplification of these twin resources into novel social forms is then evaluated. Here the SBH is used to differentiate three temporal movements (2.6–1.6 Ma, 1.5–0.4 Ma and 300–25 ka) and their varied evolutionary responses are described in detail. Attention is drawn to the second movement where there is an apparent disconnect between a rise in encephalization and a stasis in material culture. This disconnect is used to discuss the co-evolutionary relationship that existed between materials and emotions to solve cognitive problems but which, at different times, amplified one resource rather than the other. We conclude that the shape of the Palaeolithic is best conceived as a gradient of change rather than a set of step-like revolutions in society and culture.

Statistical learning of social signals and its implications for the social brain hypothesis

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hjalmar K. Turesson ◽  
Asif A. Ghazanfar
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Group Structure ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
General Mechanism ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Better Than

The social brain hypothesis implies that humans and other primates evolved “modules” for representing social knowledge. Alternatively, no such cognitive specializations are needed because social knowledge is already present in the world — we can simply monitor the dynamics of social interactions. Given the latter idea, what mechanism could account for coalition formation? We propose that statistical learning can provide a mechanism for fast and implicit learning of social signals. Using human participants, we compared learning of social signals with arbitrary signals. We found that learning of social signals was no better than learning of arbitrary signals. While coupling faces and voices led to parallel learning, the same was true for arbitrary shapes and sounds. However, coupling versus uncoupling social signals with arbitrary signals revealed that faces and voices are treated with perceptual priority. Overall, our data suggest that statistical learning is a viable domain-general mechanism for learning social group structure. Keywords: social brain; embodied cognition; distributed cognition; situated cognition; multisensory; audiovisual speech; crossmodal; multimodal

scholarly journals When Individuals Do Not Stop at the Skin

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Group Size ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Three Phases

This chapter examines contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and elsewhere in light of the social brain and the distributed mind hypotheses. One question asked is whether African hunter-gatherers offer the best model for societies at the dawn of symbolic culture, or whether societies elsewhere offer better models. The chapter argues for the former. Theoretical concepts touched on include sharing and exchange, universal kin classification, and the relation between group size and social networks. The chapter offers reinterpretations of classic anthropological notions such as Wissler's age-area hypothesis, Durkheim's collective consciousness and Lévi-Strauss's elementary structures of kinship. Finally, the chapter outlines a theory of the co-evolution of language and kinship through three phases (signifying, syntactic and symbolic) and the subsequent breakdown of the principles of the symbolic phase across much of the globe in Neolithic times.

scholarly journals The Loss of Sociality Is Accompanied by Reduced Neural Investment in Mushroom Body Volume in the Sweat Bee Augochlora Pura (Hymenoptera: Halictidae)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pahlke ◽  
Marc A Seid ◽  
Sarah Jaumann ◽  
Adam Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Mushroom Body ◽  
Brain Area ◽  
Brain Evolution ◽  
Body Volume ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mosaic Brain Evolution

Abstract Social behavior has been predicted to select for increased neural investment (the social brain hypothesis) and also to select for decreased neural investment (the distributed cognition hypothesis). Here, we use two related bees, the social Augochlorella aurata (Smith) (Hymenoptera: Halictidae) and the related Augochlora pura (Say), which has lost social behavior, to test the contrasting predictions of these two hypotheses in these taxa. We measured the volumes of the mushroom body (MB) calyces, a brain area shown to be important for cognition in previous studies, as well as the optic lobes and antennal lobes. We compared females at the nest foundress stage when both species are solitary so that brain development would not be influenced by social interactions. We show that the loss of sociality was accompanied by a loss in relative neural investment in the MB calyces. This is consistent with the predictions of the social brain hypothesis. Ovary size did not correlate with MB calyx volume. This is the first study to demonstrate changes in mosaic brain evolution in response to the loss of sociality.

scholarly journals The archaeology of the social brain revisited: rethinking mind and material culture from a material engagement perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 105971232094194
Author(s):  
Anna M Barona
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Technological Evolution ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Relational Models ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Engagement ◽  
The Relationship

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) has played a prominent role in interpreting the relationship between human social, cognitive and technological evolution in archaeology and beyond. This article examines how the SBH has been applied to the Palaeolithic material record, and puts forward a critique of the approach. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET) and its understanding of material agency, it is argued that the SBH has an inherently cognitivist understanding of mind and matter at its core. This Cartesian basis has not been fully resolved by archaeological attempts to integrate the SBH with relational models of cognition. At the heart of the issue has been a lack of meaningful consideration of the cognitive agency of things and the evolutionary efficacy of material engagement. This article proposes MET as a useful starting point for rethinking future approaches to human social cognitive becoming in a way that appreciates the co-constitution of brains, bodies and worlds. It also suggests how MET may bridge archaeological and 4E approaches to reconsider concepts such as the ‘mental template’ and Theory of Mind.

scholarly journals Population variability in social brain morphology for social support, household size and friendship satisfaction

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 635-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arezoo Taebi ◽  
Hannah Kiesow ◽  
Kai Vogeley ◽  
Leonhard Schilbach ◽  
Boris C Bernhardt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Hierarchical Modeling ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Brain Morphology ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Bayesian Hierarchical ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Human Brains ◽  
Volume Effects

Abstract The social brain hypothesis proposes that the complexity of human brains has coevolved with increasing complexity of social interactions in primate societies. The present study explored the possible relationships between brain morphology and the richness of more intimate ‘inner’ and wider ‘outer’ social circles by integrating Bayesian hierarchical modeling with a large cohort sample from the UK Biobank resource (n = 10 000). In this way, we examined population volume effects in 36 regions of the ‘social brain’, ranging from lower sensory to higher associative cortices. We observed strong volume effects in the visual sensory network for the group of individuals with satisfying friendships. Further, the limbic network displayed several brain regions with substantial volume variations in individuals with a lack of social support. Our population neuroscience approach thus showed that distinct networks of the social brain show different patterns of volume variations linked to the examined social indices.

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