Cognitive Gadgets, Cecilia Heyes
Cognitive Gadgets, Cecilia Heyes
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Cognitive Gadgets
The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

Author: Cecilia Heyes

Narrator: Esther Wane

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/24/2018


Synopsis

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.

Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.

As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.

About Cecilia Heyes

Cecilia Heyes is Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences and Professor of Psychology at All Souls College, University of Oxford.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Patrik on April 28, 2018

All in all a fantastic book. And obviously correct in its conclusions (meaning that I agree). The book sets out to show how recent human evolution (last 300 000 thousand years, at least) to a large degree has taken place in the cultural realm rather than in the biological realm. According to Heyes,......more

Goodreads review by Anita on February 14, 2021

Meni je bila izvrsna. Potpuno novi pogled na odnos nature-nurture, mnogo profinjeniji, primjeren onome što smo do sada o tome naučili.......more

Goodreads review by Adam on February 15, 2019

Like the closely related Natural History of Human Morality, this book presents a very important new idea in a relatively inaccessible form. The thesis perfectly answers a question that's been floating around in my mind for the past 6 months or so of learning about cultural evolution, essentially com......more

Goodreads review by Simon on February 21, 2019

Oxford professor of psychology Cecilia Heyes makes the case for cultural evolutionary psychology as a research program and framework, which she forcefully posits on many key points as continuous or divergent with evolutionary psychology and with cultural evolutionism of the californian school (Boyd,......more

Goodreads review by Benji on September 10, 2019

'The influence of cultural evolution is not confined to the grist of human thought. It has also shaped the mills. Distinctively human cognitive processes are products of cultural group selection. They are not cognitive instincts, but cognitive gadgets. On the cognitive gadgets view, rather than taxin......more