I’m reading Vygotsky now (Thought and Language, 1934). Whenever he or any other academic author (like Yuval Noah Harari) writes about how we evolved, imagining humans in the Paleolithic era, struggling to survive (or thrive, who can really say?), I can’t help but feel won over just by their confidence.
For instance, Vygotsky wrote in 1934: “The rational, intentional conveyance of experience and thought to others requires a mediating system, the prototype of which is human speech born of the need of communication during work.”
Sure, that makes sense. I can get behind that. But when, in my own writing, I make similar types of claims, I feel either imposter syndrome or just plain “who am I to say any of this?” What authority do I have? I’m just saying what I think based on what I know and what I’ve read and my experience and what I feel. It could be wrong but I feel confident enough to say it.
This is what Socrates was probably referring to when he was bringing up the example of Thamus’ objection to writing in the Phaedrus, that it would result in a lot of people bloviating like they know something just because they read about it. (I think technically he was referring to people having speeches written for them to memorize so they could recite them in public to look smart.)
The resolution of what we know about prehistory is not in days, months, or years. At best, we can only really talk in ranges of hundreds of thousands of years. Archeologists date objects that we think are man-made, studying marks, objects found in latrines, going through the trash to make deductions, using only circumstantial evidence to make inferences about the state of our ancestors’ minds. What were they thinking about? How were they thinking? What were their brains like, to be able to do these things?
Making declarations about our present day minds should be much easier, right? It seems that we spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving larger brains that were capable of navigating the physical and social world, and now, as we’ve learned to modify our surroundings, developed metropolises, industrial agriculture and manufactured environments, our brains are still running on the same plumbing as our hunter gatherer ancestors. The pre-eminent feature of our brains has to be its ability to adapt to different environments that we have absolutely no business surviving in, even if they are the product of our own culture.
We start training our babies’ brains to read and write even before they can control their bowels. Specifically, according to research by Dehaene and et al, we repurpose a particular area, the Visual Word Form Area, located on the left side towards the back of our brain, that was otherwise used to recognize faces. Dehaene calls this “cortical recycling.” What’s remarkable about this is that, given the environment we are born into, we can willfully repurpose areas of our brain to decode an artificial system of marks and squiggles in order to communicate and externalize thought.
What will be next?
