## Metadata - Author: [[Michael C. Corballis]] - Full Title: The Recursive Mind - Category: #books ## Highlights - Many have conjectured about why our species is so dominant on the planet. Assuredly, the reason is mental rather than physical—any number of animals out there can easily beat us in physical combat. Descartes argued that only humans are capable of free will. Aristotle suggested that man is the only political animal, and history suggests that he should have included women. Thomas Willis thought that only humans were capable of laughter, while Martin Luther argued that it was the possession of property that distinguished us. Benjamin Franklin attributed human uniqueness to tool-making, and the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said it was the human hand that made us the wisest of species. Steven Mithen recently suggested that music may have started it all. Some years ago, in my book The Lopsided Ape, I argued that the asymmetry of the human brain was what made us what we are. ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=136)) - In the seventeenth century, René Descartes argued that language, as an expression of free will, was so unconstrained that it could not be explained in terms of mechanical principles, and must therefore have been a gift from God. In the following century, another French philosopher, Abbé Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, speculated about how language evolved, but as an ordained priest he was fearful of offending the church, and disguised his theory in the form of a fable—as we shall see in chapter 4. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all discussion of the origins of language. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=145)) - In the twentieth century the linguist Noam Chomsky, himself a self-styled Cartesian, also argued that language could not have evolved through natural selection. His reasoning was based not on religion, but rather on a view of how language works. Basically, he argued that external language, as spoken or signed, must have arisen from an internal language—essentially the “language of thought”—that has no direct reference to the outside world, and so could not have been subjected to the pressures of adaptation to the environment. Chomsky therefore argued that internal language emerged from some single and singular event causing a rewiring, perhaps a fortuitous mutation, of the brain. He argued further that this event occurred late in the evolution of our species, perhaps even within the past 100,000 years. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=150)) - It remains something of an open question just how much of language depends on innate components specific to language itself, and how much on more general aspects of the human mind. It may depend not so much on what Steven Pinker, echoing Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar, called “the language instinct”41 as on what has been termed an “instinct for inventiveness,”42 coupled with a drive toward increased efficiency, that covers many other aspects of our lives, including art, music, and machines—not to mention filing systems. ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=740)) - In teaching great apes to speak, much greater success has been achieved through gesture and the use of keyboards than through vocalization, and the bodily gestures of apes in the wild are less constrained by context than are their vocalizations. These observations strongly suggest that language evolved from manual gestures. ([Location 1165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1165)) - We speak of the line of sight, but the envelope of sound—and a three-dimensional envelope at that. ([Location 1496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1496)) - In chapter 2, I noted that there is huge diversity in the world’s languages, allowing language to serve as a badge of a culture’s distinctiveness. There may also have been pressure to establish languages that were impenetrable to outsiders, thereby enhancing group membership and keeping out intruders and freeloaders. The absence of any iconic component in sound-based languages reduces penetrability, and the sheer diversity of possible sound-based systems adds further to the fortress-like nature of language. ([Location 1503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1503)) - The impenetrability of speech is well illustrated by an anecdote from World War II. The outcome of the war in the Pacific hinged to a large extent on the ability of each side to crack codes developed by the other side. Early in the war, the Japanese were easily able to crack the codes developed by the allies, but the American military then developed a code that proved essentially impenetrable. They simply employed Navajo speakers to communicate openly in their own language via walkie-talkie. To the Japanese, Navajo simply sounded like a “strange, gurgling” sound, unrecognizable even as language.90 ([Location 1508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1508)) - In Maori society, as in other traditionally oral societies, speech implies power and status; the New Zealand scholar Anne Salmond writes that, among the Maori, “oratory is the prime qualification for entry into the power game. ([Location 1520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1520)) - It might be regarded, in fact, as an early example of miniaturization, whereby gestures are squeezed from the upper body to the mouth. ([Location 1545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1545)) - the very mechanisms that create cohesion within groups can instill antagonisms between them—as the American writer and civil rights activist James Arthur Baldwin once put it, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1591)) - Endel Tulving has described remembering as autonoetic, or selfknowing, in that one has projected one’s self into the past to re-experience some earlier episode.6 Simply knowing something, like the boiling point of water, is noetic, and implies no shift of consciousness. Autonoetic awareness, then, is recursive, in that one can insert previous personal experience into present awareness. ([Location 1632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1632)) - Tulving nevertheless argues that the storage of episodic memories depends on semantic memories that are already in place—one can scarcely record a visit to a restaurant without already knowing what a restaurant is, and what happens there—but are then related to the self in subjectively sensed time. This allows the actual experience of the event to be stored separately from the semantic system.13 In this view, episodic memories could not be stored in the absence of semantic memory, which is perhaps why our childhood episodic memories do not begin until the semantic system is well established, by around age four or five. ([Location 1667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=1667)) - The relation of religion to the sense of time is born out by the Pirahã, the small Amazonian community that we encountered in chapter 2. It was the Pirahã’s lack of a sense of time, and consequent failure to understand what religion is all about, that led Daniel Everett to forego his career as a missionary among them and become an atheist—and a professor.29 ([Location 2051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2051)) - Since the understanding of space long preceded mental time travel, it is perhaps not surprising that terms relating to time have largely piggybacked on spatial terms. American Sign Language (ASL) makes use of an implicit time-line from the back of the body to the front, with the future in front and the past behind. Even in spoken languages, there is typically an implicit spatial dimension underlying our sense of time. As in ASL, English refers to the past as behind us and the future as in front, and most of our spatial pronouns, such as about, after, around, before, by, in, near, far, toward, with, and so on, refer to time as well as space. In the language of the Aymara, residents of the Andes, time runs the other way, with the past in front and the future behind; thus the expression for last year is nayra mara, literally front year, and the expression for a future day is quipüru, literally behind day.13 Their gestures about events in time conform to this arrangement. In Chinese, time is represented vertically, and travels downwards, so that the month above means last month. ([Location 2213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2213)) - The importance of time in the shaping of language is nicely illustrated by the Pirahã, the Amazonian tribe in Brazil we encountered in chapter 2. Their language is almost devoid of tense and time markers. Verbs are merely marked to indicate whether an action is within the speaker’s immediate experience (“proximate”) or not (“remote’), but there is otherwise no tense. There are a few words indicating different times, such as those roughly translatable as another day, now, already, night, low water, high water, full moon, noon, sunset, and a few others.15 The limited ability to refer to other points in time is mirrored by their actual experience of time. As we saw in chapter 2, they have no fiction or myths.16 Their kinship system is among the simplest ever recorded, and once they die, relatives are forgotten. ([Location 2222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2222)) - The Australian aboriginal language Walpiri is a more extreme example of an inflected language in which word order makes essentially no difference. Such languages are sometimes called scrambling languages. Chinese, by contrast, is an example of an isolating language, in which words are not inflected and different meanings are created by adding words or altering word order. English is closer to being an isolating language than a scrambling one. ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2287)) - More complex still is the capacity to infer what other people believe, often on the basis of observation and reasoning. This is nicely illustrated by the Sally-Anne test, which is a test of children’s ability to infer false beliefs. The child is shown a scene involving two dolls, one called Sally and one called Anne. Sally has a basket and Anne has a box. Sally then puts a marble in her basket and leaves the scene. While Sally is away Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in her box. Sally then comes back, and the child is asked where she will look for her marble. Children under the age of four typically say she will look in the box, which is where the marble actually is. Older children will understand that Sally did not see the marble being shifted, and will correctly say that Sally will look in the basket. They understand that Sally has a false belief. ([Location 2458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2458)) - At the opposite end of the spectrum to autism, it has been suggested, lies psychosis.22 At least some aspects of psychosis seem to reflect a hypermentalism. The more florid symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, include hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. It’s as though schizophrenics read too much into the minds of others, to the point that they think there are plots to exterminate them, or that their minds are controlled by some sinister external agency. ([Location 2535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2535)) - To a degree at least, the autistic-psychotic spectrum seems to underlie differences between men and women. Simon Baron-Cohen has described autism as an extreme of male behavior, and men in general seem more concerned with things than with people25—and indeed may tend to treat women as things rather than as people. Despite the efforts of feminists, young boys seem to prefer toy tractors or spaceships, while young girls go for dolls and their mothers’ makeup. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are more common in females than in males, although negative symptoms and schizophrenia as a whole are somewhat more common in males. And women tend to be more religious—as we have seen, this can be considered a rather complex manifestation of theory of mind. Students of psychology, the science of the mind, are predominantly female—at least in the departments of psychology I am familiar with—although in the old days of behaviorism there were more men about. Men may be more drawn to the sciences of the physical world. ([Location 2564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2564)) - The battle of the sexes begins in the womb, through the phenomenon of imprinting. Chromosomes come in pairs, one from the mother and one from the father, and imprinting means that one or other can dominate. The parents have different interests in the fate of the offspring, and this can be expressed in the relative influence of maternal and paternal genes. In mammalian species, the only obligatory contribution of the male to the offspring is the sperm, and the father relies primarily on his genes to influence the offspring to behave in ways that support his biological interest. Paternal genes should therefore favor self-interested behavior in the offspring, drawing on the mother’s resources and preventing her from using resources on offspring that might have been sired by other fathers. The mother, on the other hand, has continuing investment in the child both before birth, in terms of nutrient from her own body, and after birth, in terms of breast milk and care-giving. Maternal genes should therefore operate to conserve her resources, favoring sociability and educability26—nice kids, who go to school and do what they’re told. Maternal genes are expressed most strongly in the cortex, representing theory of mind, language, and social competence, whereas paternal genes tend to be expressed more in the limbic system, which deals with resource-demanding basic drives, such as aggression, appetites, and emotion. Autism, then, can be regarded as the extreme expression of paternal genes, schizophrenia as the extreme expression of maternal genes. Many of the characteristics linked to the autistic and psychotic spectra are physical, and can be readily understood in terms of the struggle for maternal resources. The autistic spectrum is associated with overgrowth of the placenta, larger brain size, higher levels of growth factors, and the psychotic spectrum with placental undergrowth, smaller brain size, and slow growth.27 ([Location 2573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2573)) - Imprinting may have played a major role in human evolution. One suggestion is that evolution of the human brain was driven by the progressive influence of maternal genes, leading to expansion of the neocortex and the emergence of recursive cognition, including language and theory of mind. The persisting influence of paternal genes, though, may have preserved the overall balance between people people and things people, while also permitting a degree of difference. Simon Baron-Cohen has suggested that the dimension can also be understood along an axis of empathizers versus systematizers.29 People people tend to empathize with others, through adopting the intentional stance and the ability to take the perspective of others. Things people may excel at synthesizing, through obsessive attention to detail and compulsive extraction of rules.30 ([Location 2595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2595)) - Recursion, then, is not the exclusive preserve of social interaction. Our mechanical world is as recursively complex as is the social world. There are wheels within wheels, engines within engines, computers within computers. Cities are containers built of containers within containers, going right down, I suppose, to handbags and pockets within our clothing. Recursive routines are a commonplace in computer programming, and it is mathematics that gives us the clearest idea of what recursion is all about. But recursion may well have stemmed from runaway theory of mind, and been later released into the mechanical world. I explore this further in chapter 12. ([Location 2624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2624)) - The essential role of theory of mind in language can be credited to the philosopher Paul Grice, who held that true language requires that the speaker has the intention of changing belief in the mind of the listener by means of the recognition of that intention. (How’s that for a recursive sentence?). ([Location 2834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2834)) - So-called relevance theory, as developed more fully elsewhere by Sperber and Wilson,12 suggests that our minds are focused, moment to moment, in such a way as to tune our thought processes to what is most relevant, and so reduce the linguistic demand. In conversation, we may be impervious to all but the topic under discussion, and oblivious to other events in the environment. This immediately disambiguates what might otherwise be multiply ambiguous statements. Any unexpected happening would likewise shift the shared mental processing, so participants in the conversation could immediately reach a mutual understanding of what to talk about. Language, then, is a meeting of minds, and conversation often does little more than float on the surface of shared streams of thought ([Location 2860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2860)) - According to Michael Tomasello, there are two kinds of ape gesture.25 One is designed to get another individual to do something. These gestures are small rituals, such as lightly hitting another animal to initiate play, or touching another beneath the mouth to request food, or touching the back of another to initiate piggyback riding. The other kind of gesture is designed to attract attention. A chimp may point to an item of food that’s just out of reach. By attracting another individual’s attention to it, the chimp may hope that the individual will pick up the food and hand it across. Other attention-getting actions include slapping the ground, throwing things, or poking another chimp. These behaviors suggest that chimps are at least somewhat sensitive to what’s going on in the minds of others, or to what others may do. A chimp may point to an object out of reach to get a person to fetch it for her, but will only do this if she can see that the human is paying attention, which does suggest some awareness of the human’s attentional state. Tomasello asserts that chimpanzees will only point for humans, and the failure to observe pointing among chimps in the wild has led to the belief that chimpanzees don’t point at all. He suggests, though, that they don’t see the point of pointing to each other since they know it won’t work. They have learned that humans are cooperative, at least in research settings, and that pointing brings its rewards.26 Other kinds of gestures between chimps may work, especially if both have something to gain, as in mutual play. In making gestures, then, chimpanzees do seem to be aware of the attentional states of others, whether human or ape, and also aware of the intentions of others. And their gestures are used flexibly and intentionally, rather than as responses induced by events. These qualities are prerequisites for language. Tomasello even refers to them as “the original font from which the richness and complexities of human communication and language have flowed.”27 But they are not sufficient. Michael Tomasello suggests that the missing ingredient is that of sharing. Chimpanzee gestures are essentially imperative, designed to bring reward or advantage to the gesturer. That is, the chimp is requesting something rather than making a statement. Studies of the use of signs by chimpanzees28 and bonobos29 in their interactions with humans have shown that 96–98 percent of their signs are imperative, with the remaining 2–4 percent serving no apparent function—except perhaps one of greeting, or scratching an itch. In marked contrast, human language includes declarative statements as well as imperative ones. We talk in order to share information, rather than merely request something for ourselves.30 The declarative function may be evident even in one-year-old human infants, who sometimes point to objects that an adult is already looking at, indicating the understanding that attention to the object is shared. Tomasello gives a… ([Location 2954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00IRL3L7I&location=2954))