The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen

Author:Simon Baron-Cohen [BARON-COHEN, SIMON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Four other psychological theories have been put forward to explain the capacity for invention, and I’m going to deal with them briefly.

The first is that we invent because we can integrate two ideas into one new one. Vyshedskiy argues that this is the role of the lateral prefrontal cortex in the brain. According to him, this is what enabled early humans 40,000 years ago to take two separate concepts (“man” and “lion,” for example) and combine them into a synthesized concept (“lion-man”) to make a sculpture of such a fictional entity. Vyshedskiy suggests that only the lateral prefrontal cortex can combine objects from memory into a novel mental image. He calls his alternative theory of human invention “prefrontal synthesis.”16

However, the lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in a lot more than integrating two ideas into one new one. And this theory isn’t really an alternative because integrating two ideas is just an operation within the Systemizing Mechanism (it’s the and in if-and-then). Thus: “if I take (the idea of) the top half of a lion, and I attach it to the bottom half of (the idea of) a man, then I have (the idea of) a lion-man.” The power of the Systemizing Mechanism is that it can perform this and any other operation on input to produce an invention, whether the input is real, or is an idea, a word, a picture, or a model (such as sculptures representing objects), to produce fictional entities (like Spider Man).17

The second theory, briefly, is the idea that we became capable of invention because we could think symbolically.18 Archaeologist April Nowell has proposed exactly this. One meaning of the term symbolic thinking is the capacity to let one thing stand for another, or to imagine that one thing stands for another, as in algebra when we say, “If x represents the number of apples in this box,” or in drawing when we say, “If this big circle I have drawn in the sand represents the Earth.” So, the first meaning of symbolic thinking involves hypothetical thinking.

This was undoubtedly a huge step forward in humans’ cognitive power—to be able to entertain thoughts about hypothetical situations—and it’s unclear if any other species is capable of this. But hypothetical thinking is not really a challenge to the Systemizing Mechanism theory of human invention because hypothetical thinking is the if element in if-and-then systems-thinking. In addition to hypothetical thinking, someone also had to use if-and-then thinking to see how ochre could be used as paint, or to make a tool like a paintbrush, or a chisel to carve a sculpture. Systems-thinking (if-and-then reasoning) had to come first.

A second use of the term “symbolic thinking” is what psychologist Alan Leslie calls the capacity for meta-representation. During meta-representation, a proposition (“the moon is made of blue cheese”) is prefixed by a mental state (for example, “I imagine that…”). The result is a sentence: “I imagine that the moon is made of blue cheese.”19 This statement can be true even if the statement “the moon is made of blue cheese” is obviously false.

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