All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases can pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning (semantics) of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas. Beyond the grammar and meaning, the sheer musicality of it can elicit rapt fascination.
Psychologist Michael Tomasello recognizes that, because all the minds of our ancestral species have gone extinct, the only way we can scientifically approach how the mind of apes evolved into our own is to comparatively study the minds of apes and developing children to ascertain what is exclusively human in human nature. In Becoming Human: …
The most basic activity of this blog is to maintain vigilance of ongoing science, particularly in the fields of psychiatry and paleoanthropology but also in numerous other fields, and to apply all relevant new findings to the Blog’s broad paradigm of the human mind. In the September 2nd issue of Science an article entitled, …
Hominin language has always been centrally engaged in the attempt to achieve a “running” consensus about which of a limited number of narratives corresponded to the chaotic events that were happening all around them.
My uncle used to work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was an artist in his soul and, among many other activities, designed the dioramas for the various exhibits. His favorite by far was the work he did at the Hall of Human Origins. He would often talk with great …
Linguist Steven Levinson criticizes evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello and linguist Derik Bickerson for being unable to shake loose of the “cold” abstract cognitive prerequisites rather than the “hot” motivational and interactive instincts that lie behind the universal patterns of multimodal communication.
Although language and tool making evolved together, much more important was the evolution of coordinated behavior.
The study of schizophrenic symptoms led to solving the mystery of why early hominids evolved upright posture.
The whole sweep of human evolution is summarized. Human social structure is seen as a hybrid of pre-hominid primate and pre-human hominid social structures. Among many qualities we have inherited from hominids is the Holy Spirit.
