Introducing the brain: language and invention (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, June 27, 2020, 10:18 (1608 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Stasis here is just another way of saying that for a long time, nobody came up with any new ideas

DAVID: Your 'stasis' is the stasis I recognize. Big brain but nothing new for quite while until the owners learned to use it.

dhw: I have never really understood what you mean by this. I haven't learned to “use my brain”. I learn as I expand my experiences, think about things, get ideas and ask questions, but I don’t “learn to use” my cortex or my cerebellum! The brain provides me with information and it responds to my requirements.

DAVID: Stasis does not really apply to you or me. The input in childhood is continuous from everyone and everything that surrounds us. That did not exist in the time frame the author discussed before language really existed. The sapiens brain of 315,000 ya undoubtedly looked and could have acted much like ours, was larger by 200 cc, and yet not used in the way you describe for yourself or me. As we've noted much input by many thinking folks over centuries has created the context of our awareness. It impinges upon us the moment we appear, and is sopped up quickly and constantly by a sponge-like childhood brain.

The stasis we’ve been talking about is the period after expansion, when there were no major new ideas for many thousands of years. As far as individuals are concerned, every child has to learn something, and I’d have thought that applied even to our earliest ancestors as well as our fellow animals. Parents teach their young, who also learn from experience. In the latter context, adults too may continue to learn. The difference between all of them and us is the sheer range and quantity of what there is to learn.

DAVID: My phrase 'learning to use it' implies the additive work done by successive humans over centuries and generations of us. They did the work. We receive the gift of that.

For me that is not “learning to use the brain”. It is learning what previous generations have learned – and in sapiens’ case, it has accumulated into a vast library of knowledge.