“We’re all a bit too involved in our cultures to see how they influence our perspectives. Even when we look in a mirror, social commonality influences the view. There’s just no mirror into which we can peer without seeing some culturally derived distortion or manifestation of Self.
“But even if there were a perfect mirror that yielded a perfect reflection, one even more precisely ground than those big telescope mirrors, the act of seeing lies mostly within, all of us seeming to have developed cataracts in the brain’s visual centers. Those wavy lenses interfere with clear seeing and prevent us from recognizing commonality’s control over individuality. Maybe if we had eyes in the back of the head closer to the occipital lobe’s neurons, we might get a better view. Then that common expression, “Just be yourself” we hear given to teenagers and to TV characters in quandaries over their desires for affections, might be realistic advice.
“We see what we’ve been trained to see in ourselves through four brain centers involved in vision, one of which is the memory-active temporal lobe that helps us understand what we see. And since enculturation is a matter of memory, the temporal lobe’s job in vision is to assign meaning based on experience and training. I recognize objects through memory. Apparently, I recognize Self similarly.
“We think we’re wise old owls, capable of seeing through obscurity and darkness. Sure, owls do have good night vision. But there’s a price they pay for those large eyes. Unlike us, owls have to move their heads because their eyes are fixed in place by sclerotic rings. Culture likewise fixes our vision centers and lessens our ability to see peripherally and to move our perceptions, so we often accept the ostensible reality as the independently-confirmable reality. With regard to Self, we frequently remember rather than observe.”
“Selfies. Selfies show us who we are,” you say. “I can take a pic of myself and see what I look like. I know who and what I am through introspection, and though I acknowledge I might be blind to my connections to my culture just the way I can’t hear my dialect or in hearing it, think nothing of its identifiable distinctiveness, I understand my nature; I see ME. I see through the shroud of culture. I see myself.”
“Really?” I ask, “When you look at a Selfie, don’t you still see what your culture has told you is important to see? What if I said every Selfie is actually a group pic that reflects family, tribe, and region? What if I said that the only true individuals are feral children, kids raised by animals? They don’t do well in society because they lack all those connections you have developed over your lifetime. Some feral children, after being found, fail to acquire even the most basic of cultural skills, the use of verbal language. You can find lists of such people online. Wikipedia has an article on feral children, both real and fictional, the latter including the hoaxes and fictional characters like Tarzan.”
“Meaning? Are you saying I’m not an individual?”
“You ask a pertinent question. No, I’m not. There’s some individuality in there, something recognizable in the mirror or in the Selfie or in the eyes of others, particularly as vision wends its way through that temporal lobe to the back of the brain. But all of us are reflections of our culture. Those who see you, see as they’ve learned to see either as members inside your culture or as outsiders. Even hermits have a cultural heritage, albeit one they believe they have rejected and left. I suppose the only exception to our group nature is that rare feral child I mentioned. But then, too, there are those species traits, the ingrained patterns of movement, neurological responses to physical stimuli, species abilities, and limitations that are all part of an evolutionary history. I can’t, for example, run on tree branches like a squirrel. A feral child named Saturday Mifune, found in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, was supposedly raised Tarzan-like by monkeys; at 17 he reportedly still moved monkey-like and couldn’t talk, and he had no human socialization skill, none whatsoever. But with regard to those non-cultural aspects of human life, note that he moved ‘monkey-LIKE.’ Consider the word after that hyphen, like. With longer straighter legs than his monkey parents and guardians, his greater natural ability for bipedalism, and structurally slightly different attachment between hip and femur, different number of lumbar bones, and that opposable thumb, Saturday’s movements were imitations at best and distinguishable as such. Yet, he was steeped in monkey culture. Observers could distinguish his human nature from his adherence to monkey culture and his anomalous human behavior.”
“Yes, I get it. I know what you are saying. Saturday looked human, right? He had human genes, human biology. I’ll grant that all humans have much in common on some fundamental species level. And biology is different from psychology. I’ll also agree that culture shapes behavior, attitude, idea, and that it informs observation. I’m also going to grant you that each of us reflects a cultural heritage and that because of our connections we are identifiable by our culture, by our viewpoints, even by our mannerisms. Everyone carries some tribal mannerism. That’s always evident when we look at brothers or sisters and see something they have in common or have in common with one or both parents, like basic appearance, for example, or gait, or facial expression. I’m sure we can identify commonality because we speak of idioms, of idiomatic expressions, many of which are not translatable beyond some literal meaning.
“But everyone adds some difference to the picture. Everyone sees someone different in the mirror, sees those variations however subtle they are. Your Saturday Mifune didn’t have the opportunity to acquire those community skills and mannerisms as a kid, and we all know that among kids reared in a human culture that those exposed to only one language as a child usually end up having an ‘accent’ when they learn a second language after the brain shuts neurons off to certain sounds. I saw an experiment once with a baby and an English-speaking adult who were tested to see if they could tell the difference between homophones and homonyms easily recognized by a native Inuit-speaking adult. The baby could tell the difference; the English-speaking adult could not hear the differences. Probably, Saturday Mifune’s brain had shut down unused neurons that might have been trained by human culture. As always, I have to ask what brought this topic to the surface of your mind. What made you start
“Complementary cognition.” *
“What’s that?”
“It’s a different hypothesis that its three proponents say is an ‘explanatory framework for why language and many aspects of cooperation evolved.’ They call it ‘a new theory of human cognitive evolution,’ though I would call label it an hypothesis.”
“Tell me.”
“Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight published an article on what they call the evolution of complementary cognition. They say that humans have cooperatively adapted and evolved through what they term a ‘system of collective cognitive search.’ To call it a theory is to jump ahead of the research game, that’s a bit of hubris on their part. But as an hypothesis worth pursuing, I think they might be onto something.
“What they propose is that you and I as individuals are ‘individually specialized in different but complementary neurocognitive search strategies’ and that we ‘regulate search for adaptive information at the group level, adapting cooperatively.’ They say this is an emergent system of collective cognitive search they call Complementary Cognition.”
“So far I’ve heard ‘blah-blah-blah.”
“Well, I can’t give you their whole argument. Essentially, because we live in a complex world with high variability and uncertainty, individual humans couldn’t possibly have found the answers to success and survival on their own; they needed some form of cooperation, some kind of group search for solutions that provided ‘efficiency and capability in search.’ It’s this ‘system of collective cognitive search’ that has enabled us to pool our individual abilities to solve problems’ that accounts for the success of our species on this challenging planet.”
“What’s this search stuff?”
“It’s a process of exploring and exploiting resources. The three authors go into it at length, but I like to think of it simply as not eating poisonous fruits like yew berries.”
“Yew berries?”
“Somehow a long time before I existed, someone discovered, maybe by becoming very sick or by watching someone else get sick that yew berries, holly berries, mistletoe, and belladonna are bad for humans. That collective discovery was passed down—unfortunately, not to everyone. The people who tried nightshade were part of a ‘search’ that produced a common wisdom and mechanism for survival.
“I can’t think of a better example than the Life cereal commercial of the 1970s. Three brothers are sitting at a table with Life cereal in a bowl. The two older brothers argue about trying the cereal for the first time. They get the idea that their three-and-a-half-year-old brother Mikey, a picky eater, should try it. Mikey tries the cereal and they exclaim, ‘He likes it! Hey, Mikey!’ I guess ‘Mikey likes it’ is the best example I can give for complementary cognition. With regard to all those poisonous foods we don’t eat, I guess someone said, ‘Don’t eat that. Remember what happened to Mikey.’ By the way, that commercial ran so often over more than a decade that it became a part of the American idiom. And Mikey, played by John Gilchrist became the center for a conspiracy theory: He supposedly died when he swallowed a mixture of Coca Cola and Pop Rocks. He didn’t. But the story is the kind of ‘search’ that the collective does in order to survive. Sure, there are many false cognitions. Some keep people from succeeding and whole populations from succeeding, such as the ‘tough guy, anti-learning culture of many inner-city youths.’ That’s a pop-rock-Coke search gone terribly wrong and one that doesn’t lead to adaptive success. And there are many famous Mikeys and influencers out there who convince large groups to adopt a strategy of life. I’m thinking of comedians who get audiences to laugh and applaud over jokes about being an addict, and peer groups that convince themselves to act in ways detrimental to their survival, like the Heaven’s Gate community or the Jonestown community that committed suicide.
This Complementary Cognition ‘theory’ is an analog of Darwin’s notion of evolution through natural selection. The authors say Darwin identified a ‘search process by which successful adaptations are inherited and updated.’ You and I are a product of an unknown number, certainly a very large one, of searches by our ancestors, and even today, you and I participate in similar searches, though the risks have been lessened by all those Mikeys who learned the lessons of survival and resource exploitation the hard way.”
“No doubt, as usual, you are going to draw some lesson from this.”
“I think that Taylor, Fernandes, and Wraight might consider exploring Complementary Stupidity in their follow-up studies. Whereas it is apparent that we have conducted ‘searches’ that have led to successful exploitations of resources, it is also apparent to me that we are just as prone to complementary stupidity from false searches, like the experiment of Nazi Germany that destroyed so many lives. That nation’s group search for some ideal form and its group think led to its destruction. What intrigues me is that the complementary cognition they provided by failure like the complementary cognition provided by the failed Soviet Union hasn’t been passed down as an irrefutable sign to the current generation.
“So, I might accept their hypothesis that they call theory that collective ‘searches’ in biological and societal evolution have enabled or species to survive, but I don’t accept that all such collective ‘search strategies’ ultimately lead to survival solutions. You know that old expression that you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time? Maybe you can. Certainly, that was what happened in Germany—okay, I exaggerate. Yes, there were some Germans who saw that collective cognition wasn’t going to end well. The question for us, today, is whether or not we can act both individually and collectively realize those ‘searches’ that will not lead us to better lives. Whenever we fail to recognize detrimental searches, we’re mixing Pop Rocks and Coke, yew berries and nightshade, anti-intellectualism and crime, heroin and meth, and Communism and Socialism. Just because someone called Mikey likes it doesn’t mean it’s good. But I'll grant that we need--and have needed--many Mikeys to try something in order for our species to survive.”
*Taylor, Helen, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight. 16 June 2021. The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search. Cambridge University Press, Online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/evolution-of-complementary-cognition-humans-cooperatively-adapt-and-evolve-through-a-system-of-collective-cognitive-search/F198B30682343E92C7E9C986332D380A Accessed June 16, 2021. Although I find some of what the three write to be, in part, mere neologism, I believe they have an approach worth considering in regard to individuality and enculturation. Complementary cognition seems to me to be an undeniable part of human interaction and a process that has led to both positive and negative results. You know, the old “If famous So-n-So jumped off a cliff….”
“But even if there were a perfect mirror that yielded a perfect reflection, one even more precisely ground than those big telescope mirrors, the act of seeing lies mostly within, all of us seeming to have developed cataracts in the brain’s visual centers. Those wavy lenses interfere with clear seeing and prevent us from recognizing commonality’s control over individuality. Maybe if we had eyes in the back of the head closer to the occipital lobe’s neurons, we might get a better view. Then that common expression, “Just be yourself” we hear given to teenagers and to TV characters in quandaries over their desires for affections, might be realistic advice.
“We see what we’ve been trained to see in ourselves through four brain centers involved in vision, one of which is the memory-active temporal lobe that helps us understand what we see. And since enculturation is a matter of memory, the temporal lobe’s job in vision is to assign meaning based on experience and training. I recognize objects through memory. Apparently, I recognize Self similarly.
“We think we’re wise old owls, capable of seeing through obscurity and darkness. Sure, owls do have good night vision. But there’s a price they pay for those large eyes. Unlike us, owls have to move their heads because their eyes are fixed in place by sclerotic rings. Culture likewise fixes our vision centers and lessens our ability to see peripherally and to move our perceptions, so we often accept the ostensible reality as the independently-confirmable reality. With regard to Self, we frequently remember rather than observe.”
“Selfies. Selfies show us who we are,” you say. “I can take a pic of myself and see what I look like. I know who and what I am through introspection, and though I acknowledge I might be blind to my connections to my culture just the way I can’t hear my dialect or in hearing it, think nothing of its identifiable distinctiveness, I understand my nature; I see ME. I see through the shroud of culture. I see myself.”
“Really?” I ask, “When you look at a Selfie, don’t you still see what your culture has told you is important to see? What if I said every Selfie is actually a group pic that reflects family, tribe, and region? What if I said that the only true individuals are feral children, kids raised by animals? They don’t do well in society because they lack all those connections you have developed over your lifetime. Some feral children, after being found, fail to acquire even the most basic of cultural skills, the use of verbal language. You can find lists of such people online. Wikipedia has an article on feral children, both real and fictional, the latter including the hoaxes and fictional characters like Tarzan.”
“Meaning? Are you saying I’m not an individual?”
“You ask a pertinent question. No, I’m not. There’s some individuality in there, something recognizable in the mirror or in the Selfie or in the eyes of others, particularly as vision wends its way through that temporal lobe to the back of the brain. But all of us are reflections of our culture. Those who see you, see as they’ve learned to see either as members inside your culture or as outsiders. Even hermits have a cultural heritage, albeit one they believe they have rejected and left. I suppose the only exception to our group nature is that rare feral child I mentioned. But then, too, there are those species traits, the ingrained patterns of movement, neurological responses to physical stimuli, species abilities, and limitations that are all part of an evolutionary history. I can’t, for example, run on tree branches like a squirrel. A feral child named Saturday Mifune, found in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, was supposedly raised Tarzan-like by monkeys; at 17 he reportedly still moved monkey-like and couldn’t talk, and he had no human socialization skill, none whatsoever. But with regard to those non-cultural aspects of human life, note that he moved ‘monkey-LIKE.’ Consider the word after that hyphen, like. With longer straighter legs than his monkey parents and guardians, his greater natural ability for bipedalism, and structurally slightly different attachment between hip and femur, different number of lumbar bones, and that opposable thumb, Saturday’s movements were imitations at best and distinguishable as such. Yet, he was steeped in monkey culture. Observers could distinguish his human nature from his adherence to monkey culture and his anomalous human behavior.”
“Yes, I get it. I know what you are saying. Saturday looked human, right? He had human genes, human biology. I’ll grant that all humans have much in common on some fundamental species level. And biology is different from psychology. I’ll also agree that culture shapes behavior, attitude, idea, and that it informs observation. I’m also going to grant you that each of us reflects a cultural heritage and that because of our connections we are identifiable by our culture, by our viewpoints, even by our mannerisms. Everyone carries some tribal mannerism. That’s always evident when we look at brothers or sisters and see something they have in common or have in common with one or both parents, like basic appearance, for example, or gait, or facial expression. I’m sure we can identify commonality because we speak of idioms, of idiomatic expressions, many of which are not translatable beyond some literal meaning.
“But everyone adds some difference to the picture. Everyone sees someone different in the mirror, sees those variations however subtle they are. Your Saturday Mifune didn’t have the opportunity to acquire those community skills and mannerisms as a kid, and we all know that among kids reared in a human culture that those exposed to only one language as a child usually end up having an ‘accent’ when they learn a second language after the brain shuts neurons off to certain sounds. I saw an experiment once with a baby and an English-speaking adult who were tested to see if they could tell the difference between homophones and homonyms easily recognized by a native Inuit-speaking adult. The baby could tell the difference; the English-speaking adult could not hear the differences. Probably, Saturday Mifune’s brain had shut down unused neurons that might have been trained by human culture. As always, I have to ask what brought this topic to the surface of your mind. What made you start
“Complementary cognition.” *
“What’s that?”
“It’s a different hypothesis that its three proponents say is an ‘explanatory framework for why language and many aspects of cooperation evolved.’ They call it ‘a new theory of human cognitive evolution,’ though I would call label it an hypothesis.”
“Tell me.”
“Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight published an article on what they call the evolution of complementary cognition. They say that humans have cooperatively adapted and evolved through what they term a ‘system of collective cognitive search.’ To call it a theory is to jump ahead of the research game, that’s a bit of hubris on their part. But as an hypothesis worth pursuing, I think they might be onto something.
“What they propose is that you and I as individuals are ‘individually specialized in different but complementary neurocognitive search strategies’ and that we ‘regulate search for adaptive information at the group level, adapting cooperatively.’ They say this is an emergent system of collective cognitive search they call Complementary Cognition.”
“So far I’ve heard ‘blah-blah-blah.”
“Well, I can’t give you their whole argument. Essentially, because we live in a complex world with high variability and uncertainty, individual humans couldn’t possibly have found the answers to success and survival on their own; they needed some form of cooperation, some kind of group search for solutions that provided ‘efficiency and capability in search.’ It’s this ‘system of collective cognitive search’ that has enabled us to pool our individual abilities to solve problems’ that accounts for the success of our species on this challenging planet.”
“What’s this search stuff?”
“It’s a process of exploring and exploiting resources. The three authors go into it at length, but I like to think of it simply as not eating poisonous fruits like yew berries.”
“Yew berries?”
“Somehow a long time before I existed, someone discovered, maybe by becoming very sick or by watching someone else get sick that yew berries, holly berries, mistletoe, and belladonna are bad for humans. That collective discovery was passed down—unfortunately, not to everyone. The people who tried nightshade were part of a ‘search’ that produced a common wisdom and mechanism for survival.
“I can’t think of a better example than the Life cereal commercial of the 1970s. Three brothers are sitting at a table with Life cereal in a bowl. The two older brothers argue about trying the cereal for the first time. They get the idea that their three-and-a-half-year-old brother Mikey, a picky eater, should try it. Mikey tries the cereal and they exclaim, ‘He likes it! Hey, Mikey!’ I guess ‘Mikey likes it’ is the best example I can give for complementary cognition. With regard to all those poisonous foods we don’t eat, I guess someone said, ‘Don’t eat that. Remember what happened to Mikey.’ By the way, that commercial ran so often over more than a decade that it became a part of the American idiom. And Mikey, played by John Gilchrist became the center for a conspiracy theory: He supposedly died when he swallowed a mixture of Coca Cola and Pop Rocks. He didn’t. But the story is the kind of ‘search’ that the collective does in order to survive. Sure, there are many false cognitions. Some keep people from succeeding and whole populations from succeeding, such as the ‘tough guy, anti-learning culture of many inner-city youths.’ That’s a pop-rock-Coke search gone terribly wrong and one that doesn’t lead to adaptive success. And there are many famous Mikeys and influencers out there who convince large groups to adopt a strategy of life. I’m thinking of comedians who get audiences to laugh and applaud over jokes about being an addict, and peer groups that convince themselves to act in ways detrimental to their survival, like the Heaven’s Gate community or the Jonestown community that committed suicide.
This Complementary Cognition ‘theory’ is an analog of Darwin’s notion of evolution through natural selection. The authors say Darwin identified a ‘search process by which successful adaptations are inherited and updated.’ You and I are a product of an unknown number, certainly a very large one, of searches by our ancestors, and even today, you and I participate in similar searches, though the risks have been lessened by all those Mikeys who learned the lessons of survival and resource exploitation the hard way.”
“No doubt, as usual, you are going to draw some lesson from this.”
“I think that Taylor, Fernandes, and Wraight might consider exploring Complementary Stupidity in their follow-up studies. Whereas it is apparent that we have conducted ‘searches’ that have led to successful exploitations of resources, it is also apparent to me that we are just as prone to complementary stupidity from false searches, like the experiment of Nazi Germany that destroyed so many lives. That nation’s group search for some ideal form and its group think led to its destruction. What intrigues me is that the complementary cognition they provided by failure like the complementary cognition provided by the failed Soviet Union hasn’t been passed down as an irrefutable sign to the current generation.
“So, I might accept their hypothesis that they call theory that collective ‘searches’ in biological and societal evolution have enabled or species to survive, but I don’t accept that all such collective ‘search strategies’ ultimately lead to survival solutions. You know that old expression that you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time? Maybe you can. Certainly, that was what happened in Germany—okay, I exaggerate. Yes, there were some Germans who saw that collective cognition wasn’t going to end well. The question for us, today, is whether or not we can act both individually and collectively realize those ‘searches’ that will not lead us to better lives. Whenever we fail to recognize detrimental searches, we’re mixing Pop Rocks and Coke, yew berries and nightshade, anti-intellectualism and crime, heroin and meth, and Communism and Socialism. Just because someone called Mikey likes it doesn’t mean it’s good. But I'll grant that we need--and have needed--many Mikeys to try something in order for our species to survive.”
*Taylor, Helen, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight. 16 June 2021. The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search. Cambridge University Press, Online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/evolution-of-complementary-cognition-humans-cooperatively-adapt-and-evolve-through-a-system-of-collective-cognitive-search/F198B30682343E92C7E9C986332D380A Accessed June 16, 2021. Although I find some of what the three write to be, in part, mere neologism, I believe they have an approach worth considering in regard to individuality and enculturation. Complementary cognition seems to me to be an undeniable part of human interaction and a process that has led to both positive and negative results. You know, the old “If famous So-n-So jumped off a cliff….”
RSS Feed