- Email: [email protected]
Where do you end, and the outside world begin?
OPINION THE BIG IDEA
Mind into matter Our minds extend way out into the material world around us, argues cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris WHERE should we look for the mind? This might sound like an odd question: surely, thinking takes place inside people’s heads. Nowadays, we even have sophisticated neuroimaging techniques to prove it. As deeply intuitive as this assumption about the boundaries of the mind may be, I think it is quite mistaken. I see no compelling reason why the study of the mind should stop at the skin or the skull. Quite the contrary. There is an abundance of evidence, ranging from earliest prehistory to the present, to testify that things, as well as neurons, participate in human cognitive life. From the viewpoint of archaeology, it is clear that stone objects, body ornaments, engravings, clay tokens and writing systems play an active role in human evolution and the making of the human mind. Consequently, I suggest that what is outside the head may not necessarily be outside the mind. In fact, I doubt if notions like “inside” and “outside” make any useful sense in the study of human cognition. It is easy to see how the mind and the brain became equated. Most of what we know about the human mind has been uncovered through isolating people from the material culture they are usually surrounded by in order to study them. This makes good sense if you are a neuroscientist, because of the constraints imposed by using a brain-scanning machine. But as a result, it often goes unnoticed that much of our thinking takes place outside our heads. Naturally, I do not mean to question the neural basis of cognition, but to point out that mind is more than a brain. Instead, it would be more productive to explore the hypothesis that human intelligence “spreads out” beyond the skin into culture and the material world. I am a cognitive archaeologist, trying to understand the way ancient people thought by studying the archaeological evidence they left behind. And this is exactly where the challenge for this field lies: at the realm of engagement with the 28 | NewScientist | 7 September 2013
material world. Meeting this challenge demands reconnecting the brain with the body and beyond, breaking with reductionistic “internalist” explanations that separate the mental realm from the realm of the material world. This is where a new theory I’ve developed – material engagement theory (MET) – comes in. At its heart, MET aims to explore the different ways in which things become cognitive extensions or are incorporated by the human body, such as when one makes numbers and symbols out of clay, or uses a stone to strike another, forming a tool. It also investigates how those ways might have changed since earliest prehistory, and what
Profile Lambros Malafouris is a research fellow at Keble College and the Institute of Archaeology, both at the University of Oxford. This essay is based on his new book, How Things Shape The Mind: A theory of material engagement (MIT Press)
“It often goes unnoticed that much of our thinking takes place outside our heads” those changes mean for the ways we think. This approach gives a new understanding of what minds are, and what they are made of, by changing what we know about what things do for the mind. Think of a blind person with a stick. Where does this person’s self begin? This famous example is one of my favourites. The unity of the blind man and the stick offers a way to conceptualise minds and things as continuous, but it also provides an analogy for the profound plasticity of the human mind: using a stick, the blind man turns touch into sight, but the stick has its own interesting active role. Tactile sensation is somehow projected onto the point of contact between the tip of the stick and the outside environment. As a result, the brain treats the stick as part of the body. This is not simply a matter of expanding “peripersonal space” – that is, the space surrounding the body. Neither is it simply a matter of substituting vision for touch. The stick does more than that. It becomes an interface of a peculiarly
transformative sort – what might be called a brain-artefact interface, or a “cognitive prosthesis”. It is especially in the latter sense that the example of the blind man’s stick encapsulates the spirit of MET. It reminds us of something that many people forget; namely, that it is in the nature of human intelligence to remain amenable to drastic, deep reorganisation by incorporating new technological innovations. Let me explain. My approach sees the human mind as an unfinished project, in a permanent state of on-going evolution and neural re-use. It is important to keep in mind that, whatever actual form the “stick” might have taken in the history of our species – from the earliest Palaeolithic stone tools to the
Soe Zeya Tun/reuters/corbis
For more opinion articles and to add your comments, visit newscientist.com/opinion
internet – its primary function was that of a pathway instead of a boundary. Through the “stick”, the human species, much like the blind man in our example, feels, discovers, and makes sense of the environment, but also enacts the way forward. Let’s not forget that from an evolutionary point of view, the main reason we have a brain is to move, not to contemplate. And it seems fair to say that the reason we came to have our sophisticated capacities for thought and language is that, unlike any other animal, we gave our movement purpose, direction and meaning. We had to use a “stick” to accomplish that; something concrete, a material scaffold to think through, with and about. We came to have a sapient mind because we are Homo faber – a concept
developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, which holds that human intelligence was originally a facility to create artificial objects. Tool-making and tool use was just the beginning in a series of prostheses and material signs. Indeed, things do much of our thinking. That is also why a stick used by a monkey in captivity to retrieve food is of a different kind. For humans, “sticks” are also used for sight – in the Aristotelian sense in which “seeing” is intimately associated with our desire to know. In contrast, for non-human animals, sticks are basically for eating. That’s a difference that makes a difference. This unique human predisposition for engagement with material culture explains why we humans, more than any other species,
A blind person’s walking stick is an extension of their mind – a “cognitive prosthesis”
make things, and how those things, in return, make our minds what they are. I call that metaplasticity – we have plastic minds that develop and change as they interact with the material world. I want to put materiality back into the cognitive equation. MET offers a new way of understanding how different forms of material culture, from the stone hand-axe to the iPhone, may have provided a powerful mechanism of defining, but also transforming, what we are and how we think. Mind-changing technology has a futuristic, sci-fi ring to it, but what most people don’t realise is that humans have used it since they first evolved. n 7 September 2013 | NewScientist | 29
Mind into matter Our minds extend way out into the material world around us, argues cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris WHERE should we look for the mind? This might sound like an odd question: surely, thinking takes place inside people’s heads. Nowadays, we even have sophisticated neuroimaging techniques to prove it. As deeply intuitive as this assumption about the boundaries of the mind may be, I think it is quite mistaken. I see no compelling reason why the study of the mind should stop at the skin or the skull. Quite the contrary. There is an abundance of evidence, ranging from earliest prehistory to the present, to testify that things, as well as neurons, participate in human cognitive life. From the viewpoint of archaeology, it is clear that stone objects, body ornaments, engravings, clay tokens and writing systems play an active role in human evolution and the making of the human mind. Consequently, I suggest that what is outside the head may not necessarily be outside the mind. In fact, I doubt if notions like “inside” and “outside” make any useful sense in the study of human cognition. It is easy to see how the mind and the brain became equated. Most of what we know about the human mind has been uncovered through isolating people from the material culture they are usually surrounded by in order to study them. This makes good sense if you are a neuroscientist, because of the constraints imposed by using a brain-scanning machine. But as a result, it often goes unnoticed that much of our thinking takes place outside our heads. Naturally, I do not mean to question the neural basis of cognition, but to point out that mind is more than a brain. Instead, it would be more productive to explore the hypothesis that human intelligence “spreads out” beyond the skin into culture and the material world. I am a cognitive archaeologist, trying to understand the way ancient people thought by studying the archaeological evidence they left behind. And this is exactly where the challenge for this field lies: at the realm of engagement with the 28 | NewScientist | 7 September 2013
material world. Meeting this challenge demands reconnecting the brain with the body and beyond, breaking with reductionistic “internalist” explanations that separate the mental realm from the realm of the material world. This is where a new theory I’ve developed – material engagement theory (MET) – comes in. At its heart, MET aims to explore the different ways in which things become cognitive extensions or are incorporated by the human body, such as when one makes numbers and symbols out of clay, or uses a stone to strike another, forming a tool. It also investigates how those ways might have changed since earliest prehistory, and what
Profile Lambros Malafouris is a research fellow at Keble College and the Institute of Archaeology, both at the University of Oxford. This essay is based on his new book, How Things Shape The Mind: A theory of material engagement (MIT Press)
“It often goes unnoticed that much of our thinking takes place outside our heads” those changes mean for the ways we think. This approach gives a new understanding of what minds are, and what they are made of, by changing what we know about what things do for the mind. Think of a blind person with a stick. Where does this person’s self begin? This famous example is one of my favourites. The unity of the blind man and the stick offers a way to conceptualise minds and things as continuous, but it also provides an analogy for the profound plasticity of the human mind: using a stick, the blind man turns touch into sight, but the stick has its own interesting active role. Tactile sensation is somehow projected onto the point of contact between the tip of the stick and the outside environment. As a result, the brain treats the stick as part of the body. This is not simply a matter of expanding “peripersonal space” – that is, the space surrounding the body. Neither is it simply a matter of substituting vision for touch. The stick does more than that. It becomes an interface of a peculiarly
transformative sort – what might be called a brain-artefact interface, or a “cognitive prosthesis”. It is especially in the latter sense that the example of the blind man’s stick encapsulates the spirit of MET. It reminds us of something that many people forget; namely, that it is in the nature of human intelligence to remain amenable to drastic, deep reorganisation by incorporating new technological innovations. Let me explain. My approach sees the human mind as an unfinished project, in a permanent state of on-going evolution and neural re-use. It is important to keep in mind that, whatever actual form the “stick” might have taken in the history of our species – from the earliest Palaeolithic stone tools to the
Soe Zeya Tun/reuters/corbis
For more opinion articles and to add your comments, visit newscientist.com/opinion
internet – its primary function was that of a pathway instead of a boundary. Through the “stick”, the human species, much like the blind man in our example, feels, discovers, and makes sense of the environment, but also enacts the way forward. Let’s not forget that from an evolutionary point of view, the main reason we have a brain is to move, not to contemplate. And it seems fair to say that the reason we came to have our sophisticated capacities for thought and language is that, unlike any other animal, we gave our movement purpose, direction and meaning. We had to use a “stick” to accomplish that; something concrete, a material scaffold to think through, with and about. We came to have a sapient mind because we are Homo faber – a concept
developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, which holds that human intelligence was originally a facility to create artificial objects. Tool-making and tool use was just the beginning in a series of prostheses and material signs. Indeed, things do much of our thinking. That is also why a stick used by a monkey in captivity to retrieve food is of a different kind. For humans, “sticks” are also used for sight – in the Aristotelian sense in which “seeing” is intimately associated with our desire to know. In contrast, for non-human animals, sticks are basically for eating. That’s a difference that makes a difference. This unique human predisposition for engagement with material culture explains why we humans, more than any other species,
A blind person’s walking stick is an extension of their mind – a “cognitive prosthesis”
make things, and how those things, in return, make our minds what they are. I call that metaplasticity – we have plastic minds that develop and change as they interact with the material world. I want to put materiality back into the cognitive equation. MET offers a new way of understanding how different forms of material culture, from the stone hand-axe to the iPhone, may have provided a powerful mechanism of defining, but also transforming, what we are and how we think. Mind-changing technology has a futuristic, sci-fi ring to it, but what most people don’t realise is that humans have used it since they first evolved. n 7 September 2013 | NewScientist | 29