Oliver Sacks has a new New Yorker piece about his upcoming book on the origins and neuroscience of reading (which I’m keen to read), and he mentions my research on the origins of writing.
Here are some links to my research on the origins of writing…
- A piece I wrote about it.
- A Telegraph story on the research by Roger Highfield.
- The journal article.
- An excerpt from my book, The Vision Revolution, about the research.
- More info.
My upcoming 2011 book, Harnessed, by the way, argues that the same strategy — “harnessing nature” — explains how we came to have speech and music. (See the draft of the book’s intro here.)
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Mark Changizi is a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books).
Changizi Blog 
Gahhh, there go my plans to burst into the pop psych scene with a brilliant bestseller on reading and neuroscience. Although the steamy neuroscience romance novel market is still wide open….
I’ll be eagerly awaiting your neuromance novel!
I’ll try to work in a reference to your research.
Just a long shot.
Deaf and blind people have enhanced sense of space and motion according to Bavalier et al. et al.
Suppose 50000 years ago society had developed enough to support these disabilities.
Suppose they lived together in caves (and were responsible for developing music and painting – because of their enhanced abilities)
Suppose they interbred and their offspring were fully sensate and also kept these enhanced sensory abilities corresponding to synesthetic connectivity.
Would these abilities have analogous – seperate interconnectivity to that in normal fully sensate individuals.
Would this form a subsense which augmented the normal senses.
Moreover have its own synesthetic connectivity which subtends and supports the normal senses.
Would this subsensory connectivity form a virtual representation or perspectival view which could be accessed by the normal synesthetic connection and perspective of hand and eye?
Is this the origin of blindsight and illusion – of filling in the optic nerve? etc
When we discovered mirrors did this further tune these separate ‘sense’ modalities differently so that their perspectives not only meshed but this subsense could distil symbolistically information and present it to the less motile or dynamically underwritten senses.?
Just a long shot.
But I think the sense of movement in cave art and the correspondence of cave paintings with auditory qualities of caves was more than a coincidence. And writing occurring with the spread of metallurgy. (In a similar vein to Julian Jaynes observations but underwritten by the technology of metal mirrors.)
Kind Regards
Peter Reynolds
Sorry …………to be more specific – was this interbreeding the origin of consciousness and did the advent of mirrors 35000 years later tune all this interconnectivity through positive feedback so to cause the development of an implicitly learned language by the implicit means of mirrors into a more complex language ‘underwritten’ by writing.
So really cave art was caused by the same phenomenon as written language but without the supersynergistic synesthesia created by mirrors?
Stuart Hameroff has asked me to submit an abstract to the Stockholm conference (Toward A Science of Consciousness 2011) next spring so anybody who has some insights as to how this might pan out in the brain and tie in with genetics or gene expression – those ideas would be welcome.
I suppose I’m posing the idea that society had evolved 50000 years ago to support the deaf and blind at some definite stage. When upon they interbred and produced fully sensed offspring who retained the enhanced perception of direction and movement that their parents had developed in their remaining sense modalities as described by Bavelier et al and others.
Thus I suppose becoming human.
Vilayanur Ramachandran has posed the question as to what happened genetically at this period to give rise to these synesthetic traits that might have given rise to the cultural revolution of cave art etc.
I am proposing this as a possible answer.
I have never studied biology or seen a cell or neuron – but I’ve read a lot.
Thinking on the hoof here – is it possible that deafness would have not been too big a disadvantage in the absence of language and might even have been an advantage in producing or enhancing a gesturally based language – so might have been tolerated earlier than blindness.
Would certain neural pathways have become unmasked in these individuals and when blindness came along as an ‘allowable’ disability, the interbreeding between the deaf and blind would cause synesthesia in the unmasked neurons associated with the enhance abilities seen in the deaf and blind.
Would this correspond to the ‘new’ or ‘conscious’ visual pathway described by Vilayanur Ramachandran and others or provide as specific type of feed into an older pathway so to distinguish it from what is now regarded as the older pathway.
These ‘newer’ neural pathways being associated with langauge in particular because it was the deaf in whom language was most clearly defined from a visual perspective.
Likewise this newer pathway would become more enhanced in offspring of the deaf and blind.
These pathways becoming unmasked in the general population according to the templates of cave art, whose narrative would instantiate and carve out routes that would lead to consciousness.
Being finally fully embedded with the use of mirrors and the constructive feedback from mirror use.
Thanks for the comments. One problem I have concerns the premise. Although the blind may end up with extra-sensitive audition, this is due to the development of the blind person’s brain during his or her lifetime. …not to genes. Thus, the extra-sensitive audition won’t get passed on.
Would it not be passed on in a blind society?
The H G Wells short story ‘Country of the Blind’ was just brought to my attention by a friend.
I was thinking that in the next valley one might have a ‘Country of the Deaf’.
But this is what I wanted to know.
Is it only that these traits are a learned behaviour?
Originally my thinking was that cave art was conducted by the deaf – because of their enhanced sense modalities due to rewiring in the somatosensory cortex leading to greater synesthesia.
And likewise music was developed by the blind for the same reason.
I postulate this because Nicholas Humphrey advocated cave artists to have similar abilities to Nadia an infant autistic savant. But I was thinking more likely that a deaf community might have similar artistic abilities (historically autism was confused with deafness) because of their enhanced sense of movement which characterises cave art, and because deafness would have been the first disability to be tolerable in a society with a high mortality and low life expectancy. However it would be nice if one could marry the best of these disabled abilities in caves where flutes are found in association with cave art.
In relation to your own work – do you think the symbols used as letters create the illusion of movement – so when they are put together – the eye – or maybe the brain – or the combination – are drawn along – in the same way as they are drawn along when they are investigating the object which a word might describe. – so to effectively recreate a representation of the object – ‘in the mind’ as it were.
So the words that represent objects are a natural result of the way we investigate that object according to the salience of edges corners or loops which are its characteristic.
Where does fear fit into your thinking?
I was thinking that the motivation for cave art and perhaps even the earliest figurative art was the overcoming of fear.
I interpreted – particularly the earliest cave art – as an attempt to control our environment, by expressing what we were afraid of. Most of early cave art portrayed large predators and dangerous animals-our life expectancy was short – not many hominid fossils exist.
I think of cave art as a battle plan – understanding the enemy – and overcoming him. In sharing this understanding so overcoming the fear of the unknown.
The first time you meet a cave lion in the flesh might well be the last time. But you will be aware that the lion kills.
I think our fusiform first evolved to recognize our predators – and have words for them.
Like the prairie dog. Probably arising from implicit associations between sounds and images of predators.
Driven by a need or driving force of reducing and controlling fear. In doing so – allowing a planned response to the environment. And space in the brain for doing this.
I’ve been having a little think about your ideas concerning the inter-relationship of the components of written symbols and nature – publishing a letter in this weeks Newscientist.
I point out that Daniel Dennett suggested in his TED talks that we are only ever conscious of a small proportion of our visual field. And even of this portion which we focus our attention on – of which we think of ourselves as being ‘aware’ at any given instant, -we still only detect certain well defined features such as edges (maybe as you describe) etc
Could the construction of consciousness itself – of the conscious moment – the ‘here and now’ – could this be the linguistic reconstruction of the patterns which we identify during this period of sensory focus.
So that the assemblage of the conscious moment occurs by the reconfiguring of ‘hallmark’ patterns which our senses have evolved to distinguish in the visual field according to the rules of language. Do these hallmark patterns ‘self-assemble’ into language?
Interesting. I’ve tended to stay away from consciousness, mostly because I simply have come up with no ideas about how to make sense of it. On language, though, in my upcoming book I argue that language was essentially an invention, and culturally evolved to be shaped well for our auditory system and brain. And, presumably, we were conscious long before language. Thanks, -Mark
Don’t you think all animals have a narrative going on inside their head telling them what to do? Julian Jaynes argued that before 3000 years ago all people had a voice in their head which they assumed was that of the Gods -telling them what to do.
I was thinking along the lines of Dennett (although he thinks diffrently that consciousness is an illusion) that the way we focus attention (or for eg – become ‘aware’ or ‘conscious’ of something) is achieved following linguistic lines.
Perhaps that when we interrogate a visual field for salience we detect edges and keynote features of this field – exactly in the way you describe – and reassemble them linguistically as you describe.
So when we think we ‘see’ something – what we really mean is that we can fit it into a linguistic narrative that is ‘about’ the photons or other sense inputs that reach us from our environment – so to contextualise them.
I think the problem as I understand it with ‘consciousness’ is why we should have ‘feelings’ when a robot without feeling could achieve and do everything that we could do. So why feel? Why be ‘conscious’?
In the case of blindsight an individual can walk around obstacles without consciously seeing them -likewise with sleep walking – so why do we need ‘conscious’ vision?
i was thinking that these ‘feelings’ derive from the neural process of language. They come as a kind of biproduct of the linguistic process. ( I call them a spandrel of the evolution of language)
eg – they can’t be helped because we become aware of objects in our environment through a linguistic process of arranging and stitching together long and short term memories into a apparent continuous ‘stream’. Using the process that you describe of shape recognition etc to attach the synthesis of those shapes to memories linguistically.
This process requiring ‘focus’ or attention which is separate to the simultaneous bombardment of our sense organs continuously.
In a way this linguistic process then draws us away from the here and now as it takes time. so our narrative of the world – our ‘language’ exists separate to the world.
In a recent article in Newscientist (‘the writing on the cave wall’ I think February) it was noted that a number of symbols (perhaps 26 ) were found in association with cave art throughout the world.
I couldnt help but notice that ‘rune stones’ used traditionally by fortune tellers use about this many stones and it occurred to me that they look like cave art symbols.
Could there be a parallel?