The Prehistory of the Mind Export

@book{citeulike:1540759, abstract = {{Try an experiment: take a passenger along on a brief car trip--a jaunt to the supermarket, say. Have a nice conversation while you're driving, and take a scenic route. Now, the next day, try to reconstruct the details of both the conversation and the trip. Chances are, unless something unusual happened along the way, that your memory of both will be indistinct, for we tend to forget the mundane--an example of what the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls "rolling consciousness with swift memory loss."<p> Steven Mithen, an archaeologist with an interest in psychology, believes that just such a consciousness obtained among early humans when they went foraging for food or made tools. The evolution of higher, more memory-laden consciousness, he continues, occurred only as a result of a cognitive trick that doubtless involved some trial and error. The trick, simply put, was to guess what the social behavior of some member of one's social group might be in a given circumstance--to step outside one's own mind, in other words, and enter another's. This guesswork underlies the famed cave paintings of Altamira, an attempt to predict the behavior of migratory animals. It underlies as well another experiment: the development of agriculture, with the requisite predicting of how plants and animals might behave under a wide range of conditions.<p> Mithen's reconstruction of the ancestral human mind, laid out in a clear and accessible narrative, is a fine intellectual adventure. <I>--Gregory McNamee</I> } {'An accessible, very well written, provocative and most valuable book' Lewis Wolpert, Observer How do our minds work? When did language and religious beliefs first emerge? Why was there a cultural explosion of art and creativity with the arrival of modern humans? This ground-breaking book brings the insight of archaeology to our understanding of the development and history of the human mind, combining them with ideas from evolutionary psychology in a brilliant and provocative synthesis.}}, author = {Mithen, Steven}, citeulike-article-id = {1540759}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike01-21&amp;path=ASIN/075380204X}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike06-21&amp;path=ASIN/075380204X}, citeulike-linkout-2 = {http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/075380204X/citeulike00-21}, citeulike-linkout-3 = {http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike07-20&path=ASIN/075380204X}, citeulike-linkout-4 = {http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/075380204X}, citeulike-linkout-5 = {http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN075380204X}, citeulike-linkout-6 = {http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?keywords=075380204X&index=books&linkCode=qs}, citeulike-linkout-7 = {http://www.librarything.com/isbn/075380204X}, day = {04}, howpublished = {Paperback}, isbn = {075380204X}, keywords = {archaeology, consciousness, prehistory, shamanism, theory}, month = {May}, posted-at = {2007-08-07 14:49:41}, priority = {2}, publisher = {{Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )}}, title = {The Prehistory of the Mind}, url = {http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike07-20&path=ASIN/075380204X}, year = {1998} }

TY - BOOK ID - citeulike:1540759 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1540759 N2 - {Try an experiment: take a passenger along on a brief car trip--a jaunt to the supermarket, say. Have a nice conversation while you're driving, and take a scenic route. Now, the next day, try to reconstruct the details of both the conversation and the trip. Chances are, unless something unusual happened along the way, that your memory of both will be indistinct, for we tend to forget the mundane--an example of what the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls "rolling consciousness with swift memory loss."<p> Steven Mithen, an archaeologist with an interest in psychology, believes that just such a consciousness obtained among early humans when they went foraging for food or made tools. The evolution of higher, more memory-laden consciousness, he continues, occurred only as a result of a cognitive trick that doubtless involved some trial and error. The trick, simply put, was to guess what the social behavior of some member of one's social group might be in a given circumstance--to step outside one's own mind, in other words, and enter another's. This guesswork underlies the famed cave paintings of Altamira, an attempt to predict the behavior of migratory animals. It underlies as well another experiment: the development of agriculture, with the requisite predicting of how plants and animals might behave under a wide range of conditions.<p> Mithen's reconstruction of the ancestral human mind, laid out in a clear and accessible narrative, is a fine intellectual adventure. <I>--Gregory McNamee</I> } {'An accessible, very well written, provocative and most valuable book' Lewis Wolpert, Observer How do our minds work? When did language and religious beliefs first emerge? Why was there a cultural explosion of art and creativity with the arrival of modern humans? This ground-breaking book brings the insight of archaeology to our understanding of the development and history of the human mind, combining them with ideas from evolutionary psychology in a brilliant and provocative synthesis.} SN - 075380204X TI - The Prehistory of the Mind PB - {Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )} KW - archaeology KW - consciousness KW - prehistory KW - shamanism KW - theory AU - Mithen, Steven PY - 1998/05/04/ UR - http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike01-21&amp;path=ASIN/075380204X ER -