Aggregating transdisciplinary media for an increasingly interconnected world.
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Why Evolution May Favor Irrationality - Newsweek →
From the article:
Why evolution may favor irrationality.
Source:
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Laurie Santos on monkeynomics | Publications
Source: cognitionandculture.net
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On pointing, cognition, and stray dogs... →
The argument goes something like this. When young infants begin reaching for objects just out of their range, adults are most likely to respond to those reaching attempts and to retrieve the item for the baby when the latter’s index finger is more prominently extended. That is to say, initially, the adult mistakenly reads into the child’s reaching attempt as a communicative gesture on the part of the child. Over time, this dynamic between the child and adult serves to further “pull out” the index finger because the child implicitly learns the behavioral association, so that it slowly becomes a genuine pointing gesture. There are several varieties of pointing, and this is important for understanding why dogs’ comprehension of the gesture matters. Typically, before 18 to 24 months of age, pointing is used to manipulate others’ behaviors only, just like we’ve seen in the description above. If a baby drops her toy on the ground and points to it while looking at you, she’s basically saying, “Well, what are you waiting for, give it to me!” In developmental science jargon, this is called imperative pointing because it’s more or less a demand. But as children’s brains continue to develop, and once they’re able to conceptualize others as conversational partners who have minds that hold information, pointing becomes declarative . The two-year-old now uses pointing to say, “Hey, look over there!” because she recognizes that youre not aware of whatever it is (the neighbor’s cat in the bushes, the exorbitantly large man eating a snow cone at the park) and wants to share this fascinating information with you. In fact, difficulties with comprehension and production of declarative pointing are often used as diagnostic indicators of autism in young children, a disorder characterized by social cognitive impairments.
Fascinating article.
Source: crookedindifference
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ideas, instincts, and intuitions: For Better and Worse, The Web Is Changing How We Think →
In the past few weeks, the internet has worked itself into a state over one question: does the web make people stupid?
It’s a discussion that in large part was started by Nick Carr, whose recent book The Shallows argues that the internet is changing the way our brains work for the worse….
Source: romeviharo
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Douglas Hofstadter on Analogy as the Core of Cognition (Stanford Presidential Lecture Series in the Humanities and Arts)
Source: fuckyeahphilosophy
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Our evolutionary success is partially due to our ability to cooperate
Photographer: Tobias Wolter
An article in Scientific American explains our evolutionary advantages that placed us on the top of the food chain, those being the C’s: cognition, culture, and cooperation.
Here is part of the article discussing cooperation:
Whether demonstrated by situations of hunting, foraging, child rearing or migrating, humans with culture, in pursuit of shared goals, had much to gain through cooperation. Cooperating humans would lead to greater survival, greater reproduction and colonization.
After all, other primates cooperate, said anthropologist Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in reproductive strategies of old-world monkeys. Communal breeding, for example, reduces stress on bonnet macaques creating greater reproductive success.
Our western culture is a competitive one with a history built on Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan etc. We exercise our competitive drive in the marketplace, in sports, in politics, and between nations. However, our laissez faire ideals and “survival of the fittest” mentalities underestimate the power of cooperation which, according to the article, is one of the reasons we have had such evolutionary success. This is important for our race to remember as we face challenges too big for any single nation to solve such as climate change, overpopulation, scarcity of resources, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and more.
This is not to say that competition is bad but we have to realize it’s not a panacea. We are after all members of the same species, and our continued evolutionary success will require our ability to recognize opportunities where cooperation is more beneficial for all parties.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
From the podcast:
“Where humans left the apes in the dust, however, was in social skills, according to Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute.
He claims in a follow-up in The New York Times Magazine that our culture, language, economy and sophisticated tools exist because of our tendency for “collective cognition”.
Comparing children and chimps, Tomasello found that humans recognize and commit to group tasks, whereas chimps have no such expectation of others.
Apes communicate to get others to do what they want, but children talk or gesture to share information.”If we can assume that the human brain is hardwired for information-sharing and group-mindedness, would this provide an insight into the debate concerning the telos of human language? There are those who argue that language serves as a means to mutual and intersubjective understanding. Does this research on “collective cognition” give credence to this argument?
