Humans also have a tendency to render and reduce complex successions or coincidences of events as a single “thing.” We give it a name and reify the succession-coincidence as an object which can then be subjected to analysis. The recent “financial crisis” is a perfect example. Whatever the crisis is or was, it is not a singular object that can be dissected with a simple story. Despite this fact, we have no shortage of stories which purport to explain not only what it is but also what caused it.

In “Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth,” behavioral scientist Reid Hastie explains that our brain’s inbuilt preference for narrative obscures the complex, multi-causal truths of the matter:

Compared with all other animals, we are endowed with remarkable capacities for causal discovery and causal reasoning, the skills that underlie the narrative habit. The divide between human and our nearest primate cousins in causal cognition capacities is as dramatic as our advantage in language use.

The trouble is that narrative thinking often supplants scientific thinking in domains of analysis and policy where we should look for more than a good story. Narrative thinking is easier for the thinker than its less natural analytic alternatives, and it is often persuasive when used to make arguments to others.

For one thing, narratives give us a false sense of understanding and control, when they are really mere re-descriptions of selected sub-parts of the events to which they refer. Once we have a good narrative summary, we have the illusion that we could have intervened and controlled outcomes, or could have predicted what in hindsight seems to be an obvious outcome. But, unlike valid causal explanations that support informative forecasts and suggest ways to change events further down the causal stream, narratives lack these basic properties of true causal explanations.

Narratives also tend to be dominated by a few major actors, and faux explanatory power is derived from simplistic interpretations of those actors’ characters and motives. And the universal human illusion that consciously accessible thoughts are in the driver’s seat and controlling our own actions means that the salient actors in a narrative we want to understand are attributed information and incentives to a greater degree than is warranted.

So the next time you hear a good story about why the financial recession, or any other economically significant event, was caused by a single collection of bad actors — or how a simple linear narrative “explains” an important event — remember this: Just as we are wired to like a diet rich in fats and sugars, we have an appetite for simple, coherent narratives. Neither habit is good for our long-term health.

This is good advice that should be applied across domains, including the evolutionary and historical study of religions. The next time you hear a simple, linear, and satisfying story about some outcome or event, interrogate it.

When contemplating hallucinations in American culture, we tend to think of only two: the psychotropic fun kind and the psychotic horrifying kind. This habitual binary is not a biological given but rather is a cultural construction. Hallucinations exist along a spectrum, and different societies experience and categorize them in different ways. This makes hallucinations the perfect subject for a psychological anthropology that examines the interplay of biology and culture.

Sensing the analytical richness of the field, Stanford professor Tanya Luhrmann has turned her attention to the social construction of sensory experiences in general and “non-rational” hallucinations in particular. She states that her current research goal “is to distinguish the different patterns of sensory experiences most commonly identified as divinely inspired and those most commonly identified as psychiatric symptoms, and to understand those patterns in historical and social context.” To this end, Luhrmann is studying American evangelicals and psychiatric patients. As someone raised in an evangelical home, I can bear witness to the rife possibilities.

In the 2011 Annual Review of Anthropology, Luhrmann published a primer (open) on sensory overrides or hallucinations. She begins by asking why hallucinations occur: What is happening in the mind? Although there is no firm consensus, most agree that hallucinations are tied to perception and what is known as “reality monitoring.” This perspective views the mind not as a passive recipient of direct stimuli (the Hume-like model), but as an active agent which filters, interprets, and constructs experience from stimuli (the Kant-like model). Because we know the latter model is far closer to being correct, hallucinations become explicable:

From the reality monitoring perspective, hallucination-like experiences occur not because there is necessarily something wrong with one’s mind, but because one interprets something imagined in the mind as being real in the world. The most plausible mechanism here is that we constantly experience perceptual “breaks,” which we repair below the level of our awareness, either by filling in a perceptual break from its surrounding perceptual field or by interpreting the break with prior knowledge (e.g., the way being told that strange sounds are English can change the way one hears them). Hallucinations probably occur in the process of repair, and the cause is likely more often perceptual bias than perceptual deficit.

In the case of perceptual deficits, we make things cohere by creatively filling the gaps. In other contexts, this is called confabulation. In the case of perceptual bias, a need or yearning is being fulfilled: “Someone who perceives an ambiguous noise is more likely to interpret it, someone who needs an answer is more likely to listen for one, and someone who believes that an answer can be heard is more likely to hear one.” While this is a useful analytical distinction, it seems more likely that these work in tandem: when we experience perceptual gaps we fill them with perceptual bias. It’s a powerful process capable of generating hallucinations.

Given our tendency to categorize hallucinations either as psychotropic fun or pathological delusion, we should be mindful that hallucinations needn’t be either. There are ranges of hallucinations and these may exist along a continuum. You don’t need take drugs or be mad to hallucinate.

Knowing this, Luhrmann identifies three patterns of hallucinations that appear in all societies. The first and most pervasive is Sensory Override, in which people “experience a sensation in the absence of a source to be sensed.” The paradigmatic example is the hearing of a voice even though no one is present or no one has spoken. Although the hearing of non-existent voices is common across cultures and has been attributed to all manner of spirits, gods, ghosts, and other imaginaries, in the US it is often reported by charismatic Christians who believe God is talking. Luhrmann’s research links this experience to an attentional state which dampens external stimuli and amplifies internal arousal:

Absorption is the capacity to become focused on the mind’s object — what humans imagine or see around them — and to allow that focus to increase while diminishing attention to the myriad of everyday distractions that accompany the management of normal life. It is the mental capacity common to trance, hypnosis, dissociation, and much other spiritual experience in which the individual becomes caught up in ideas or images or fascinations.

The second hallucination pattern, Psychosis, is the one we often associate with hallucinations. It’s the pathological, distressing, and debilitating kind. The third, which Luhrmann calls Joan of Arc, might be more aptly called Prophet. People exhibiting this pattern may hear voices for extended periods of time and intensely hallucinate on occasion but otherwise seem normal. I tend to think this pattern is related to psychosis and falls on a pathological continuum. It is probably a less severe form of psychosis, analogous to high functioning autism on that spectrum.

Throughout her review, Luhrmann emphasizes that hallucinatory experiences are shaped and constrained by learning and expectation. Hallucination experiences are socially constructed and culturally patterned. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of the supernatural and religious, where hallucinations are highly valued. Luhrmann calls this “Spiritual Training” and comments:

It is also true that spiritual training may make sensory overrides more likely. Inner sense cultivation — and mental imagery cultivation, in particular — is at the heart of shamanism and is central to many spiritual traditions….[T]wo dominant forms of mental techniques in effect train the human mind to experience the supernatural: techniques that focus attention on the inner senses and those that train attention away from thought and sensation. Examples of the former include shamanism, Tibetan vision meditation, and the Ignatian spiritual exercises; examples of the latter are Zen meditation and Centering Prayer.

Both train the attention, and they probably train the capacity for absorption. Although the psychological literature is largely silent about whether these training techniques generate sensory overrides, the ethnographic and historical literature strongly suggest that inner sense cultivation produces sensory experiences that are interpreted as signs of the supernatural.

For reasons that may be related to ongoing fieldwork with Christian informants, Luhrmann doesn’t focus on its hallucinatory aspects or encouragements. Having descended from a long line of supernatural practice, it is not surprising to find that Christianity also trains these techniques. While it is possible that everyone who experiences sensory override is in touch with the ethereal, the more parsimonious (and experimentally verifiable) explanation resides in the biology and culture of the mind.

Reference:

Luhrmann, Tanya. (2011). Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40, 71-85 : 10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145819

Postscript: This was a timely post. Luhrmann has published an ethnography of sorts about her experiences and observations during a two year course of fieldwork with an American evangelical church. The New Yorker tepidly reviews the book here, and Science covers the hallucination aspects of the book here.

The history of ideas is also strange. Few modern materialists realize that the road from dualism to monism was paved primarily by Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a Viennese physician whose fame (or infamy) today is due mostly to his status as the founder of phrenology. Gall has gotten a bad rap and deserves rehabilitation. Phrenology, for all its popular quackery, contained key insights into localization of function — the idea that certain parts of the brain are dedicated to particular tasks. Another aspect of Gall’s phrenology, one for which he should be remembered, is that the brain alone gives rise to thinking and constitutes the self.

From Cartesian Dualism to Gallian Monism

Alcmaeon of Croton, a Greek philosopher and physician who lived around 500 BC, is credited with being the first to assert that the brain was the seat of the mind. He also was one of the first to claim that humans possess a soul, and it was the soul that animated living things. In so doing, Alcmaeon set the stage for a dualism that would persist for nearly two millennia.

Plato preferred Alcmaeon the philosopher and greatly expanded on his ideas regarding the soul. Hippocrates preferred Alcmaeon the physician and derived his concept of the four “humours” (blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm) from Alcmaeon’s idea that an imbalance of “powers” (wet, dry, hot, cold) caused disease. While many would attempt to maintain a distinction between the physical (which was the province of medicine) and mental (which was the province of philosophy), the boundary was always fuzzy: ailments of the body could be afflictions of the soul.

While there was general agreement on the existence of a soul, there was no agreement as to its location and the mechanics whereby it interacted with the body. Some argued for the heart and others for the head. Everyone agreed, however, that the soul and mind were closely linked, if not identical. Human uniqueness was firmly based on the soul-mind, regardless of its physical location.

In 1641, Rene Descartes formalized nearly two thousand years of mind-body dualism with the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, in which he unequivocally separated mind (soul) from matter (body). Metaphysical speculations about the mind did not begin to give way to material understandings until the 1660s, when Thomas Willis and his Oxford Circle colleagues established that the brain was closely linked to behavior. Although Willis’ explanations of the brain and its workings still bore the trappings of Hippocratic humours and Galenist spirits, they are nonetheless recognizable as the first mechanical account of the nervous system.

In 1664 Willis published Cerebri Anatome, a landmark work which effectively established neurology as a scientific discipline. For all his accomplishments, Willis remained a devout dualist who believed that the soul-mind was seated in the brain. Descartes, for his part, had no doubt that the soul was located in the brain; he placed it in the pineal gland. During the century after Willis, those interested in the nervous system spent most of their time dissecting and mapping. While they provided ever more refined anatomical descriptions of the brain, they did not attempt to explain how it related to mind or behavior. Because dualism was still dominant, most what was known about the mind continued to come from introspective philosophy.

This state of affairs changed dramatically in the early 1800s when Franz Joseph Gall began lecturing and publishing on cerebral anatomy and localized function. Although Gall is today known – and ridiculed – as the founder of phrenology, his reputation is largely undeserved. Because phrenology was but one part of Gall’s work that was popularized by others, primarily for profit, most treatments of Gall tend toward caricature.

Franz Joseph Gall -- Founder of Phrenology

Gall was, in some respects, the founder of modern neuroscience. He published his major work, Anatomie et Physiologie du Système Nerveux en Général, in four volumes between 1810-1819. In this work and others, Gall espoused many of the ideas that continue to guide the mind sciences, and which frame several current disputes within those sciences. Among these are: (1) the brain is the physical locus of the mind; (2) mind arises from physical matter; (3) the brain-mind is the basis for behavior; (4) the brain has separate and distinct regions or parts; (5) each region or part of the brain has a particular and specific function; and (6) these functions or “faculties” are innate. Collectively, these ideas establish Gall as the first mind-matter monist.

Gall’s monistic materialism was so threatening to religious dualists that the Austrian emperor proscribed his lectures and the Catholic church listed his books in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum. These were not, however, the ideas for which Gall was most famous. Fusing his empirical neurology with Johann Lavater’s physiognomy, Gall asserted that the various mental faculties corresponded to specific regions of the brain, and that the relative development of these faculties shaped the brain in ways that corresponded to bumps on the skull. Phrenology was thus born.

It is difficult to understate the social and cultural impact that phrenology had in Europe and America between 1815 and 1845: “For the early Victorian generation, phrenology represented a widespread movement affecting science, philosophy, religion, and education” (McLaren 1974:87; McLaren 1981). By 1836, there were more than thirty phrenological societies in Europe and nearly as many in the United States; many members were physicians and professionals. That same year, interest was so intense that Hewett Watson (1836) published Statistics on Phrenology, in which he meticulously noted that 64,000 works on phrenology had been sold and more than 15,000 plaster heads molded. George Combe’s hugely popular Elements of Phrenology was first published in 1824, went through several additions, and sold more than 100,000 copies.

Phrenological Materialism and Monism

Regardless of its scientific validity, phrenology was a naturalistic and secular doctrine that had a corrosive impact on dualism and religion. Commenting on this fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “Gall and Spurzheim’s Phrenology laid a rough hand on the mystery of animal and spiritual nature, dragging down every sacred secret to a street show. The attempt was coarse and odious to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it; it felt connection where the professors denied it, and was leading to a truth which had not yet been announced.”

The truth not yet announced was, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Since Darwin’s time, most scientists have come to accept that material matter is solely responsible for immaterial thought. While Darwin deservedly gets much credit for this development, some of the debt is owed to Gall, the original mind-matter monist.

References:

McLaren, Angus. (1974). Phrenology: Medium and Message. The Journal of Modern History, 46 (1) DOI: 10.1086/241166

Castro-Caldas, A., & Grafman, J. (2000). Those Were the (Phrenological) Days The Neuroscientist, 6 (4), 297-302 DOI: 10.1177/107385840000600412

McLaren Angus. (1981). A prehistory of the social sciences: phrenology in France. Comparative studies in society and history, 23 (1), 3-22 PMID: 11614370

Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”

With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:

[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.

Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.

Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:

But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.

I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.

Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.

It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”

It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”

If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:

They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.

This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.

Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

Once a month my mastiffs and I walk to our local bookstore, located right in the center of a thriving restaurant and arts district filled with locally owned shops. It’s a daylong affair, punctuated by coffee, conversation, and discovery. The owner whom I’ve known for years is always there; she brims with  obscure knowledge and wonderful recommendations. I’ve read at least 20 books this year I never would have considered or even known about without her. I’ve read another 40 books I never would have considered or known about without spending many hours browsing the shelves and stacks. Many are no longer in print and most haven’t been reviewed.

At the end of a magical day, we go next door with a backpack full of books for beers and some food. The dogs like beer. On one of our recent outings I came across Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief, published in 1935 by Joseph Jastrow. It is curiously written in Victorian style and on the surface appears to be a series of vignettes demonstrating human folly and foible.

Jastrow, an early pioneer in experimental psychology and eccentric founder of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divides the book into 7 parts that correspond to 7 psychological traits or propensities. When these traits are combined and not overridden by rationality or reason, the common result is mental error and unfounded belief. According to Jastrow, the traits are:

• Credulity: The Urge to Believe
• Marvel: The Appeal of Wonder
• Transcendence: Escaping Limitations
• Prepossession: Finding What You Look For
• Congenial Conclusion: Folk-Mind and Doctrinal Survivals
• Cults and Vagaries: Strange Solutions
• Rationalization: Flaunting Reason’s Banner

At the start of each section Jastrow explains what each trait (which can be psychological, cultural or both) means and how it works. Following this prefatory telling, he then shows each trait or proclivity in historical action. There are 3-4 standalone vignettes for each section; some are well known (Madame Blavatsky, Ouija, Numerology, Phrenology, Clever Hans) whereas others are wonderfully obscure and rescued from oblivion (Leo Taxil, Theological Zoology, Astral Chemistry, Jaeger Woolens). The moral of each story is that humans are psychologically prone to wishful thinking and with cultural reinforcement (which is never lacking) we will believe just about anything.

Jastrow was taking aim at all manner of supernatural, mystical, and magical thinking, yet did so in ways that did not directly attack religion. He reasonably surmised that if the religiously inclined were to contemplate his carefully chosen examples they would realize there could be no principled distinction between one form of folly and another. Jastrow’s friendship with William James may have prompted the book and been a gentle rejoinder to the man who turned toward mysticism later in his life.

In closing, Jastrow — a pioneer in the evolutionary study of language — asks why humans are driven by sincere wishes and dubious confirmations. Without any apparent sense of irony, he roots the problem in language:

I place first vagueness, with its symbol, the cloud. If you would impose, be cloudy, vaporous, misty; soar under conditions of low visibility, trailing a smoke-screen in your wake. Erratic beliefs like wraiths shun daylight; clarity is their vital enemy. And man, by the very necessities of his mental existence — by the urgencies of expression and communication — has, in the supreme invention of language, forged the very instrument of his undoing. Words make effective cloud-screens. As indispensably as they express thought when used lucidly they may as effectively mask it, obscure it, conceal its absence.

In all ages, cultists and propagandists of a hollow or shaky cause resort to verbal screenery. The more successful become adept in linguistic obfuscation. My reference is not to the most common employment, the political appeal, nor to rhetoric, which Huxley called the pestilent cosmetic smearing the fair face of truth. My theme is limited to beliefs and faiths which in intent make an appeal to fact. In another reference, I have called this trend the lure of the obscure, accounting for the wide prevalence of the cult of the occult.

This provides a nice sense for Jastrow’s style, which during the 1960s landed him on the required reading list for undergraduate English majors at Harvard. Rendered differently, it’s a clarion call that hearkens back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and forward to Jerry Coyne.

For me, the moral of this story is not that Jastrow prefigured or presaged recent work in the cognitive study of religion, or that he did it in high style with entertaining vignettes. It is that I never would have found this book or known that it existed by searching Amazon. Had I been Farhad Manjoo, this nothing is what I would have found. Support your local bookstore.

Though we don’t know when humans first gained the ability to talk, my guess is that one of the first topics of protracted conversation revolved around dreams. Making sense of dreams surely was a priority. My guess is also that those who offered the most convincing explanations or interpretations were the first shamans.

It probably did not take long for these early shamans, whose status derived at least in part from their ability to interpret or make sense of dreams, to discover that dream-like states could be induced outside of sleep. Physical exertions and deprivations could lead to trance states and hallucinations. Psychotropic plants could do the same.

Shamans the world over interpret these experiences as soul flights. From a shamanic perspective, the problem with sleep-dream soul flights is they are hard to control. While some control can be gained through training or what is called lucid dreaming, there is greater possibility for control and direction when one is awake. This may explain why shamanic societies tend to place greater emphasis on deliberately induced trance states than they do on sleeping dream states.

In shamanic societies, the tight linkage between supernatural beliefs on the one hand and dreams-trances-visions on the other is not in doubt. The traditional exemplar comes Australian Aborigines, whose supernatural cycle is known as Dreamtime or Dreaming. Other well-known examples come from the San of southern Africa with their trance dance and the Plains Indians with their vision quest. In Amazonia, the use of psychotropics to induce “spiritual” hallucinations or soul flights has long been famous.

In all these cases, sleep dreaming has taken a back seat to deliberately induced altered states of consciousness. An interesting exception to this comes from the historic Iroquois, whose supernatural beliefs were structured in large part around sleep dreaming and the interpretation of dreams. In Jesuit Relations (1610-1791), which constitutes one of our best sources on Amerindian life during the early contact period, missionaries characterized sleep-dreaming as “the Iroquois divinity.”

This is a fascinating twist on the dream-trance-vision complex and its relationship to supernatural beliefs. I can’t help but wonder whether it constitutes a survival of sorts or whether it is a unique development that presaged Freud by hundreds of years.

There may however be something special about the relatively recent and fully modern human pulses out of Africa. When humans arrive in Europe and Australia about 45,000 years ago, we find tell-tale archaeological signatures ranging from burials to tools. The most salient signature is evidence of symbolic thinking, the proxies for which are usually carved figurines, grave goods, personal adornment, and rock art. Evidence of symbolic behavior is, in turn, usually taken to be a proxy for language fluency. My reasoned assumption has always been that where we find symbolism-language, supernatural beliefs and ritual activities are also present.

Although there is a general sense that the humans who most recently left Africa to colonize the world were symbolically and linguistically modern, this sense is troubled by the fact that the earliest and most compelling evidence for these abilities comes from Europe. The African record hints at these abilities some 75,000 years ago in the form of new tools, ochers, and adhesives, but persuasive symbolic proxies such as figurines and art are lacking. Hence we have a gap between presumably modern humans in Africa some 75,000 years ago and undoubtedly modern humans in Europe 45,000 years ago.

One possible way of bridging this gap is to look for evidence of symbolic behavior along the migration routes which led to the peopling of Australia. This is precisely what Jane Balme and colleagues did in “Symbolic Behaviour and the Peopling of the Southern Arc Route to Australia” (2009). Because the coastal migration routes followed by humans 75,000-45,000 years ago are now mostly submerged due to rising sea levels, it is not surprising that the evidence is sparse.

Along the Arabian peninsula, there are no fossils and few tools. There are some suggestive sites in India but dating has been problematic. In southeast Asia, the earliest firm date (46 kya) for the presence of modern humans is at Niah Cave in Borneo. In Australia, there is some controversy over dating but most estimates place humans there by 45,000 years ago. There is therefore not much archaeological evidence for the Africa to Australia migration which presumably took 30,000 years to complete.

As the authors observe, even less of this evidence is symbolic:

[T]he earliest unambiguous evidence for symbolic behaviour in South Asia is the ostrich egg shell beads dated to 28,500 years; the earliest explicitly symbolic artefacts are found on the Indian subcontinent between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. In Wallacea and Australia the earliest evidence for symbolism overlaps with the time of the arrival of people in Australia and includes painted rock fragments dated to 42 ka from Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley…there is evidence for ritual burial practices at Lake Mungo, about 40,000 years ago, in the form of cremation and fragmentation of one body and the use of sprinkled ochre on the extended burial of another.

This relatively limited record has caused several researchers to observe that “evidence for symbolic artefacts associated with the colonisation
of Australia is slight compared to the record for the colonisation of Europe by anatomically modern humans.” While Balme and colleagues don’t disagree, they argue that the migrants surely were capable of symbolic behavior. In support, they contend that the colonists traversed several kinds of challenging environments (from desert to plain to jungle) and boats were needed for some crossings. To the authors this suggests complex or modern cognition:

The crucial point to be made, however, is the theoretical position that the rapid colonisation of the southern arc indicates that it was colonised by people engaged in complex information exchange systems, who displayed planning depth and conceptualisation and these attributes were all bound up with the development of language.

While this is probably true, the limited data do not compel the conclusion. As things currently stand, there isn’t much evidence for symbolism along the route or at the early Australian destinations. We can infer symbolism or language but this doesn’t really bridge the gap between maybe-symbolic Africa 75,000 years ago, definitively-symbolic Europe 45,000 years ago, and probably-symbolic Australia 45,000 years ago.

We still don’t know whether the first modern humans out of Africa were linguistically fluent or whether such fluency developed along the way. Regardless, I don’t think symbolism or language was necessary for such a journey. The ancient presence of Homo erectus in Indonesia and Homo floresiensis or “Hobbit” on the Island of Flores certainly suggest this.

Reference:

Balme, J., Davidson, I., McDonald, J., Stern, N., & Veth, P. (2009). Symbolic behaviour and the peopling of the southern arc route to Australia Quaternary International, 202 (1-2), 59-68 DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2008.10.002

Jaynes begins the essay by reminding us that motion, our understanding of which today is taken for granted, formerly was a problem:

Motion is now so much the domain of physics that it is difficult for us to appreciate that this was not always so. Before the seventeenth century, motion was a far more awesome mystery. Shared by all objects, stars, ships, animals, and men, and since Copernicus, the very earth itself, it seemed to hide the answer to everything. The Aristotelian writings had made motion or activity the distinctive property of living things, an idea that occurs naturally to children and primitive peoples of all centuries.

Motion, in other words, was conceived as animation. Everything that moved did so through the agency of unseen forces or spirits.

Early theorists of religion, such as Edward Tylor, called this understanding “animism” and asserted it was the earliest or original form of religion. Modern theorists of religion, such as Scott Atran, call this understanding “folk physics” and argue that religion arises from the over attribution and imputation of agency.

Although Jaynes wasn’t thinking in these terms, this early essay on motion presages his later interest in religion. Motion and religion may not seem to be related, but they are and have been perhaps since the beginning. Jaynes seems to have understood this.

While recounting the intellectual history of motion, Jaynes comments on Fabricus ab Aquapendente (1537-1619), an Italian Renaissance thinker and rival of Galileo. In 1618, Fabricus published a book containing this remarkable statement:

In truth, nature fulfills her aim by so bestowing behavioral movements and functions among animals that they preserve themselves through them; this consists in a preservation of the ablest in obtaining food, in continuing the species, and in avoiding injury.

It looks like Fabricus was thinking along evolutionary lines several hundred years before Darwin.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian (1970). The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (2), 219-234 DOI: 10.2307/2708546

But our homunculi are not just liars and confabulators. They are also credulous and can easily be fooled into believing they intended to do something when they had no such intention. The setup for this experimental finding, by Margaret Lynn and colleagues, was surprisingly simple.

Test subjects sat in front of a computer screen. They thought they were connected to the computer through a phony brain-computer interface, which may have looked like this:

The subjects were then told to move lines that appeared on the screen by thinking about moving the lines. Although the lines did in fact move, the movement was caused by the experimenters. In some cases, the movement was frequent. In others, it was infrequent.

Under conditions of frequent line movement, participants reported more intentions to move lines. Under conditions of little movement, participants reported fewer intentions. Because the test subjects had absolutely no control over line movement, the results suggest we can be fooled into believing we intended something we didn’t.

While credulity may know some bounds, the bounds seem to be fairly elastic and easily manipulated.

Reference:

Lynn, M., Berger, C., Riddle, T., & Morsella, E. (2010). Mind control? Creating illusory intentions through a phony brain–computer interface Consciousness and Cognition, 19 (4), 1007-1012 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.05.007

Source:LiveScience

This isn’t surprising. Socially constructed and doctrinal lines separate “religion” and “spiritual” from “paranormal” and “magic.”

The common substrate is belief in the supernatural, which arises naturally from ordinary operations of the brain-mind. While these operations can be overridden, they rarely are because nearly all societies reinforce such beliefs with specific supernatural and religious content.