How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an acute awareness of our own mortality. Other animals show faint glimmerings of innovation – crude tool use, for example – but no other species has so much as invented a fork, let alone a bicycle or a nuclear power plant. Something happened in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to cause an explosion of ingenuity orders of magnitude greater than anything seen in other species, including our big-brained cousins the Neanderthals. But what? And when?
According to Simon Baron-Cohen, the gates of human invention opened between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand years ago. The key was the evolution of a brain system – he calls it the ‘Systemising Mechanism’ – that caused a radical shift in our ancestors’ understanding of the world. Instead of looking at objects and events as isolated elements of experience, the mind could now conceive of them as components of a system, using recursive if-and-then patterns of thought (deploying the terminology of the 19th-century logician George Boole). We had grasped the concept of causality. The engine of invention was turning and Homo sapiens had broken free from a seeming eternity of hominin creative stagnation, during which the design of primitive hand axes had scarcely altered in well over a million years. It was just a matter of time before we split the atom.
This great cognitive leap forward did not, as rival theories contend, depend upon the emergence of language, although once the fires of invention had been kindled language acted as a powerful accelerant, facilitating if-and-then reasoning by allowing us to articulate and manipulate new ideas. Even then, the Systemising Mechanism would not have gained full force without the evolution of yet another game-changing brain system unique to modern humans, the ‘Empathy Circuit’. If-and-then reasoning was well suited to analysing relatively static features of the physical environment, but it was ill equipped to cope with the dynamics of social interaction. This was a job for the Empathy Circuit, with its two distinct subsystems: cognitive empathy (imagining the thoughts and feelings of another) and affective empathy (responding with appropriate emotion to others’ thoughts and feelings). Together they formed bridges between minds and, consequently, enabled a commerce of new ideas.
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