by Chip Walter
These settings, perhaps because they are encased in rock and filled with the ghostly work of their artists, feel sacred and magical. It’s easy to imagine ceremonies of some kind taking place within the bowels of the earth accompanied by chants and primeval music. Archaeologists have found drumsticks, flutes, and a prehistoric instrument called a bull–roarer near the caves of Lascaux. You can hear the rocky acoustics amplifying the chants and music, the drumsticks beating out a steady rhythm accompanied by the eerie thrumming of the bull–roarer, a sound like the breathing of some great sleeping beast, all combining to make a powerful and ancient symphony that moved and bonded the new kind of primates who listened.
Music may be the most ancient of human arts. Chanting and dancing were arguably practiced by tribes of Homo erectus over a million and a half years ago, and later by Homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, seven hundred thousand years ago. Thirty–five thousand years in the past, dancing and music had likely become much more complex than the varieties our more ancient predecessors practiced, a way to entertain and express personal feelings as well as to bond and celebrate.
The importance of dance and music in the human psyche is probably best illustrated by a single startling fact. We are the only primates that can tap our foot or move our body in time with a specific rhythm. It’s wired into us, but not into our chimp or gorilla cousins, which tells us that it is a trait that like language, big toes, and toolmaking evolved sometime over the past seven million years.
It’s difficult to explain why Homo sapiens took more than a hundred millennia to show off the creativity that stands as the irrefutable proof that the stock from which you and I sprang had truly arrived, but that hasn’t stopped it from being passionately debated. Some paleoanthropologists argue that an explosion in Homo sapiens population seventy thousand years ago eventually generated competition that in turn encouraged innovation. Others believe that there was no “big bang,” no sudden blossoming of human creativity and symbolic thinking at all. Instead we are simply seeing the slow and aggregated results of gradual human progress that finally left behind enough proof in the fossil record that it existed. Others have argued that as the human race grew, creative ideas that had once been conceived but later lost were now picked up and passed along more easily. More of us were around to ensure that great ideas were absorbed, reused, and built upon rather than wiped out when the innovator passed away.
Another possibility exists. Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein holds that the catalyst for human creativity didn’t happen outside in the real world, but inside our heads—a genetic mutation, or series of them, that transformed the way our brains functioned so that symbolic thought and the creativity it makes possible erupted from our ancestors’ minds like Athena from the head of Zeus. Somewhere, somehow, he believes, the wiring or the chemistry of the brain changed, perhaps subtly, and crossed an invisible threshold that made it possible for us to attach complex meaning to otherwise meaningless pictures, objects, or sounds. Images could represent gods; beads and shells could represent value; shapes could stand in for ideas that anyone who saw them would mutually, and immediately, understand. Sounds could become symbols for words, and symbols could be built into the grammar and syntax that make language the remarkable thing it is.
Once this happened, says Klein, “humanity was transformed from a relatively rare and insignificant large mammal to something like a geologic force.” The mechanisms for this change are unknown. It could be random genetic mutation, or, as University of Cape Town archaeologist John Parkington theorizes, a new kind of diet. Parkington believes it is not a coincidence that the early humans in South Africa who were making jewelry from seashells were also eating large amounts of seafood out of those very shells, and that food was providing the fatty acids that we today know are crucial to brain health and function. The new sources of food, he believes, combined with a more modern cerebral architecture than earlier humans, made these Homo sapiens “cognitively aware, faster–wired, faster–brained, smarter,” and their seashell jewelry, art, and technical advances stand as the proof.6
There is evidence that the chemistry of the modern human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of us, operates differently from that of other primates. When scientists in Shanghai, China, compared one hundred chemicals in the brains of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques, they found that the levels of twenty-four of them were drastically higher in the human prefrontal cortex. It would be interesting to know how these levels would compare to those in the brains of Neanderthals, Homo ergaster, or even Homo sapiens who lived more than seventy–five thousand years ago, but, of course, none of those specimens exist. Would we find that somehow the brain had leaped chemically forward, allowing us to cross some unknown hormonal Rubicon? The findings indicate that when it comes to glutamate, the main excitatory neurotransmitter in our brain, we modern humans are in a league all of our own, constantly burning vast reservoirs of it compared with other primates. This may reinforce Parkington’s theory that something has made us “faster–brained.”
As it happens our penchant for inventiveness is also linked to our species–wide predilection for youthfulness. That shouldn’t surprise us. When you look at creativity in action, it bears a close resemblance to a child at play. One of its hallmarks is that concepts, thoughts, words, or objects that don’t normally go together are joined in novel ways and result in something that is useful or arresting or jaw–droppingly beautiful. When these coalitions come together in a eureka! moment, something that once seemed improbable now stands, right there, real and complete.
For children nearly everything in the world is new, and so almost any combination of unfamiliar experiences can result in those moments of discovery. Since so much is unfamiliar in a child’s experience there is enormous room for learning. But as we grow older and experience more, the space for true innovation narrows, and the stakes rise. The creative bar becomes trickier to reach. Startling is tougher to come across. Still, we humans manage to do it every day, day after day. And the reason we do is because, of all the apes, we are the most childlike.
By shifting the time when genes express themselves, and by rearranging brain and hormonal chemistry, neoteny not only transformed the way we look, but the way we act. Cognitive scientist Elizabeth Bates wrote about the power of neoteny and its ability to generate powerful change in 1979, but at the time she didn’t connect it with creativity; she associated it with another benchmark event in human evolution, language. She (and others) believe that a human “language acquisition device” evolved, like nearly everything else in life, by recombining a variety of preexisting capacities into a new configuration. Human language, she argued, was built on the shoulders of “various cognitive and social components that evolved initially in the service of completely different functions … [and] that at some point in history, these ‘old parts’ reached a new quantitative level that permitted qualitatively new interactions, including the emergence of symbols.” Put another way, neoteny helped shift the growth patterns of one or more capacities our ancestors already possessed for interacting with one another and commandeered them for new uses.7
If neoteny played a central role in the emergence of language, could it also have played an earlier role in the ingenuity that symbolic thought requires? It’s possible. The timing of the expression of certain genes, including genes that control brain growth, made and makes our long childhoods. It extends the time our brains are pliable and able to bend to our personal experience. But because human neoteny is so extreme, it has done even more than that. While it acts most powerfully during our childhood and makes childhood possible, it also extends childlike behavior throughout the long course of our lives. Even in old age, we are more childlike than other primates are in their youth. The brain flexes and muses and creates right up until the end. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old,” the aging playwright George Bernard Shaw once mused, “w
e grow old because we stop playing.”
This means we are not only children longer, we are childlike longer, and that has made us by far the most creative and adaptable creatures ever. “We are not a computer that follows routines laid down at birth,” Jacob Bronowski once observed. “If we are any kind of machine, then we are a learning machine.”
This is why child’s play and creativity are so deeply linked. Play has multiple meanings depending on whether you are an anthropologist, psychologist, parent, or child, but among its hallmarks are the simple joys of pushing boundaries, expanding limits, randomly galumphing around to see what happens just for kicks. Even long–faced philosopher Martin Buber had to admit, “Play is the exultation of the possible.”
At the heart of playing is the strange phenomenon of curiosity. You really can’t have one without the other. One theory about curiosity is that we are all born “infovores,” that we crave new knowledge and experience in something like the way we crave food. It’s a kind of mental and emotional hunger that requires ongoing feeding and satisfaction. Old knowledge doesn’t satisfy our curiosity because it’s familiar; we have “eaten” it before. So how do we know when something is new? Because it surprises us, because it’s different from what we are used to, fresh.
Every creature has an evolved talent for identifying what is surprising or out of the ordinary for one simple reason: it’s central to survival. Those that fail to tune in to the change around them, those that aren’t sensitive to surprise, soon join the legions of species no longer with us. It’s a talent that reaches back hundreds of millions of years.
For modern humans like you and me this makes curiosity a way to gather new information that has survival benefits, but also a process for gathering the building blocks out of which we assemble entirely new experiences and new forms of knowledge. One of the behaviors that makes us different is our affection for playing around randomly, joining this with that or that with another thing with no particular reason except to create more surprises that satisfy our curiosity, which in turn results in still newer experiences, new inventions and insights. Innovation and originality are by–products of our lifelong, childlike love off goofing off!
In some ways, play resembles evolution itself, randomly introducing unpredicted and unpredictable innovations the way random mutation reshapes DNA. When you think about it, adaptation in nature is a kind of learning. Something different comes into the world, and living things adjust genetically. The adjustment is serendipitous, not conscious, but it happens.
Play does something similar. It randomly introduces new experiences to our minds, again and again. We encounter novelty, and when we find it useful or enticing, we make it ours. It literally changes our minds, and therefore us. And since not one of us learns quite the same things, since each of us plays in different ways and is surprised by different experiences, your changes of mind are different from mine, which makes each of us unique. Our view of the world is not entirely distinct, but distinct enough that we ourselves become new and surprising additions to it. This also means that you and I can learn from one another by sharing our differences, a little like the way two parents’ different chromosomes combine to create a genetically unique child. By acquiring new experiences and then sharing them, ideas and originality become sticky and spread from mind to mind.
No matter how long we live, we can’t seem to root the child out of us entirely, joyful in its experimentation, never satisfied, hungry for knowledge, and eager to show it off. When you look at us this way—a lifelong child, with a mind itching to play, and famished for surprise—you can see how the power for creating originality out of random experience, and the ability to share those experiences, could have taken us from a mere ten thousand or so primates seventy–five thousand years ago scrambling back from the abyss of extinction, to seven billion creatures who have not only populated every corner of the planet, but managed to rocket away from it a few times to orbit and land elsewhere in the solar system. By connecting the surprising experiences and ideas we spawn or stumble across, and then sharing them with one another, we have been able to construct great edifices of new knowledge—Pythagoras’s geometry, Newton’s and Leibniz’s calculus, the wheel, clocks and longbows, the Saturn V rocket and the silicon chip and balalaikas, silk paintings, the telescope, money, sailing ships and steam engines, kissing and language, music of all kinds and toys of every imaginable stripe, chess, baseball, sculpture, and van Gogh’s Starry Night—all of it out of the combined, interlocked, unique imaginings of millions of minds shaped by billions of surprises shared in trillions of exchanges to create the chaotic, astonishing, tumultuous stew we call human culture. In this sense, we are a race of continually startled, and startling, creatures.
Once the adaptable nature of such a pliable human brain had been sufficiently honed and wired to make all the improbable internal links needed to connect “new” into still newer creative acts, human culture was guaranteed to evolve at exponential speed.8
However it all happened exactly, clearly something radically different was emerging in the brains and minds of Homo sapiens from Europe to Africa to Australia between seventy–five thousand and forty–five thousand years ago. Some sort of cerebral critical mass was frothing. Neoteny had created a nimble, pliant brain that remained flexible throughout life and generated both unique people and unique ideas. We had evolved into born learners, genetically encouraged to seek out and, by some strange neuronal alchemy, devour surprise and transform it into knowledge.
This may be why we, and not Neanderthals, are still around today to wonder where we came from. It may explain why you are at this moment gazing at a page of symbols I have typed that your mind, rather astonishingly and without much seeming effort, translates into thoughts you can understand.
Neanderthals lived faster than we did and they died younger, and possibly therein lies the reason we remain and they don’t. Though they, too, were neotenic and time had also been genetically rearranged for them so that they were born earlier and remained young longer than today’s chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, their childhoods were not as long as ours. This gave their brains less time to shape their personal experience, their ideas, and their personalities before they began to grow more rigid. And growing more rigid, they may have been a less childlike species, less prone to experiment. That would have made them less adaptable. Perhaps this was also true of the Denisovans, and the Red Deer Cave people of south China, even the “hobbits” of Indonesia. Their minds may have been as sharp, but not as plastic, as those of the Homo sapiens who had recently migrated out of Africa. Perhaps they all became more set in their ways sooner; more adult, you might say.
Neanderthal tools, and the little we know of their rituals, indicate they were on the cusp of our brand of symbolic thought, but some pieces, we don’t know how many, didn’t quite fall into place in a way that allowed them to remain among us today. If their language was songlike as Mithen has theorized, they might have expressed the emotions they were feeling, more than the explanations of why they were feeling them. There might have been more passion, less logic, or maybe less of a balance between the two.
We can imagine them as a bright, lyric, almost mystical species, but not a fully symbolic one. Perhaps they lived in a kind of surreal, Daliesque world, less self-aware, not altogether capable of encapsulating the ephemera of the new thoughts their minds conjured into carvings, sculpture, patterns, or images made from strokes of paint. Because that is what symbols do, they translate thoughts and ideas into tight, little packages of meaning for delivery from one mind to another. It is miraculous really.
Maybe the Neanderthals weren’t radically different from us, or less intelligent; they may simply not have been able to play their way into symbol making as complex as the kind we stumbled upon. In particular, perhaps they couldn’t play their way into the most shattering gift of all—spoken language as we know it today, complete with the bells and whistles of grammar and syntax. Perhaps.
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sp; Our youthfulness, our propensity for playing with, and juggling and shuffling, surprising experiences and insights continually and in more startling incarnations must have cried out for an invention as elegant as language. When you step back from it, language is something like a piano. Using nothing more than a piano’s eighty–eight keys, a player can express an infinite number of songs, and infinite variations on those songs. With language we can express an infinite variety of thoughts, feelings, ideas, and insights. Before modern language, our ancestors may have been capable of gesture, art, and song with which to bundle and share the flickerings of their minds, but imagine, how modern language must have supercharged human creativity and the culture that was assembled out of it?
The thing is, while language connected us to one another more closely than ever, it also enabled us to pull off another remarkable feat: it made us aware that we are aware. It may also have made madness possible.9
Chapter Eight
The Voice Inside your Head
I am a strange loop.
—Douglas Hofstadter
If you could shrink down to the size of a molecule and slip into your brain, you would find yourself flying among billions of neurons along great highways of dendrites and axons with streams of chemicals splashing across synaptic gaps and firestorms of electricity arcing all around. At this scale, the real estate of your mind would be vast, planetary in its dimensions, as you rode your molecule–size vehicle. Everywhere commands that make it possible for you to walk, breathe, see, smell, speak, reflect, and imagine would be at work.
Witnessing the weather of your thoughts and feelings like this would be extraordinary, but even from this vantage point, or maybe because of it, you could never imagine that all of the impulses and chemistry blowing up and down the intricate infrastructure around you could possibly be you. Yet it is. You are assembled from these nonstop, chaotic processes; the rolled–up, aggregated chemistry and biology through which you are zipping. Stupefying but true.