Understanding the New Dynamic:
Art, Technology, and the Mind

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Watch Video    (204 Mb)

Modern media are the most recent variation on a long line of symbolic technologies invented by human beings. The media determine a great deal about the way we represent and remember reality. However, they also also change the way the brain carries out its cognitive business. This is a very fundamental change, whose long-term impact is not yet clear. To frame the question of how technology affects the mind, it is useful to take a long-range view of human cultural and cognitive evolution. Our species emerged about 160,000 years ago, in an environment that lacked any form of art or technology other than stone tools, shelter, and body decoration. Literacy is a very recent development, emerging only during the past five thousand years. There has been no time to evolve an adaptation for literacy, since it has been imposed on the human brain and mind in a very short period. Media literacy has had even less time to evolve. Thus the key question is: Can our ancient brain handle the challenges of managing a social-cognitive system dominated by modern media? This lecture will outline the trajectory of human cognitive evolution, and its interaction with cultural and technological evolution. Viewed in this context, the electronic media constitute an immensely powerful force whose sudden appearance on the planet has created both dangers and possibilities.

About Merlin Donald:

Prior to his appointment as founding chair of the department of cognitive science at Case, Merlin Donald was professor of psychology and education at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. A cognitive neuroscientist with a background in philosophy, Donald did his early empirical work in the field of human cognitive and clinical neuroscience. He is currently trying to understand how the slow-moving biology of the brain can deal with the changing cognitive ecology. Humanity is greatly concerned about changes in the physical ecology, but has largely ignored equally massive changes in the cognitive ecology, even though the latter will probably set our future direction as a species.

During the past 15 years, he has returned to the topic that first drew him to psychology. This work bridges several disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. His central thesis is that human beings have evolved a completely novel cognitive strategy: brain-culture symbiosis. As a consequence, the human brain cannot realize its design potential unless it is immersed in a distributed communication network, that is, a culture, during its development. The human brain is, quite literally, specifically adapted for functioning in a complex symbolic culture.

Where would these complex communication networks have come from in the first place, if they were largely absent in our ancestors, the Miocene apes? This question was first addressed in his first book, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, published by Harvard University Press in 1991. The central thesis of that work was that symbolic thought and language were ultimately products of changes in the primate executive brain, rather than of a specific language "chip." These changes expanded some basic attentional, metacognitive, and retrieval capacities that were nascent in primates, and highly evolved in hominids. These capacities were crucial in meeting the adaptive challenges of increasing social complexity, with an associated need for very rapid learning and an optimally flexible epigenetic strategy. This idea was further developed in a series of papers and in a book entitled A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (W. W. Norton, April, 2001).