The Origins of Human Imagination

[Cath B]

I'm going to a talk by Professor Andrew Whiten, Professor of Evoluntionary and Developmental Psychology and Wardlow Professor (Univeristy of St Andrews) and Professor Robin Dunbar, Director of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (University of Oxford) at the Edinburgh Science Festival (http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/Programme/Talks/What-Makes-Us-Unique)later on today.

I'm looking forward to it.

[Febble]

Sounds good! Can you take notes and post a summary?

[Cath B]

I'll have a bash at it! But my notes will be impressionistic not written.

[SteveF]

I really like Dunbars work - he's inspired quite a lot of my thinking for my PhD. Here are a couple of his key papers with regards to the evolution of cognition:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/evolpsyc/Ann_Rev_Anthrop.pdf

http://www.liv.ac.uk/evolpsyc/Evol_Anthrop_6.pdf

[Monad]

Me too - Dunbar has also written a couple of great books. I quote his stuff on gossip all the time in my Communication classes.

[Cath B]

Sorry to take so long to get back. I've just spent a few days in a flat without internet access. Many thanks for the links SteveF.

The talk was by Dunbar, with Whiten giving the introduction. There was not enough time for a question & answer session though we did get a chance to mingle and network over a glass of wine afterwards. My husband and I drank the wine but chickened out of the networking.

The main ideas as I recall them were:-

Our large brain (and in particular neocortex) and associated cognitive skills evolved to enable us to function in an increasingly complex pre-human and human society.

We have evolved Theory of Mind (the ability to attribute mental states of others).

We are able to deal with understanding intentionality and can thus comprehend and partake in manipulative situations like:- "A does w so that B thinks x and tells C y who does z to D up to four or five "levels of intentionality"

We are able to have some grasp of individual personalities of folk up to a limit of around 150. Within those 150, we link more closely with some than others. This figure has been linked to the size of group meetings of hunter-gatherers, mediaeval villages, family Christmas card list size etc.

The psychological stresses of social life within primates is alleviated by grooming. By some statistics I didn't quite follow involving size and complexity of human groups and neocortex size Dunbar pulled out a figure of (I think) 47% as the time we'd expect to spend grooming. However, because we use language, storytelling, dancing and things like charismatic church services we can get away with a lot less.

Shakespeare was very smart because he could not only get to grips with several levels of intentionality in Othello etc. but also had to account for the impact the play would have on his audience.

My husband actually found the talk more interesting than I did because the ideas were newer to him. I'd already encountered most of them through reading works by the likes of Pinker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinker) and Geoffrey Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_%28evolutionary_psychologist%29) (who both quote Dunbar) and was just a tad disappointed not to hear anything new to me.

But I'd like to read his books and see everything spelt out in more detail.

I was wondering myself whether social grooming time in humans can also be reduced by our ability to ponder individually over social situations we have experienced, expect to experience or can imagine experiencing - including time spent multitasking (well I am female after all!). I spend a lot of time doing this, perhaps because I'm a very late developer socially (haven't fully got there yet!)