New Scientist
Our blender brain: How mixing ideas made us human
* 26 February 2014 by _Mark Turner_
(http://www.newscientist.com/search?rbauthors=Mark+Turner)
About 50,000 years ago we started to mash up incompatible concepts – and
everything from science to fashion is the result
THERE are many things that humans can't do. We can't run like cheetahs,
fly like eagles or echolocate insects like bats. But the human contribution
to the miracle of life is obvious: we are the origin of new ideas.
We hit upon new ideas, lots of them, on the fly, all the time. They arise
constantly in our minds, and sometimes tumble out to influence other minds
and change the world.
How do we do it? How does our thinking leap beyond our existing knowledge
to make new ideas? The answer is that we blend multiple ideas that are
already in our minds, and these blends contain new ideas that didn't exist
before.
Blending is a basic mental operation, and many species may be capable of
creating rudimentary blends. Imagine, for instance, a dog that has learned
the game of fetch from its master, who exploited the dog's instinct to
retrieve. The dog's notion of playing fetch includes its master, but not me.
Yet
if I walk up to the dog with a ball, it might be able to blend its idea of
playing fetch with its idea of me, so that, in the blend, there is
something new. I'm now the one who throws the ball for the dog.
That is a simple blend, combining compatible notions. But human beings
seem to have taken an additional step up the blending ladder. At some point,
perhaps in the Upper Palaeolithic era, which began around 50,000 years ago,
we developed the ability to blend ideas that are in strong conflict, or
incompatible. This advanced blending capacity is the source of our creativity.
Consider the "lion man" ivory figurine, which was carved at least 32,000
years ago, and discovered, smashed to bits, in a cave in southern Germany in
1939 (its gender is actually indeterminate, but I have adopted the term
"lion man" for ease of reference). Its shards lay neglected for decades, but
since its reassembly in 1998 scientists have pointed to this figurine as
evidence of the emergence of human creativity. What the figurine clearly shows
is the mental ability to blend different concepts: lion and man are not
merely held in mind at the same time, they are also used to create a new,
blended, concept – a lion man, who is neither a lion nor a man. We would never
confuse lions and men, yet, without being deluded, we can blend them to
create a new idea. On top of this, we also blend our idea of the lion man
with our idea of the carved ivory to conceive of the representation.
This may seem elementary. All over the world today, people constantly
discern and create representations. Children see things in the clouds:
dragons,
ships, trees. People use twigs to sketch figures in the sand. But this
capacity isn't elementary at all. If a person living before the Upper
Palaeolithic era had possessed the flexible, creative ability for blending, he
or
she should have had no difficulty carving a face in stone. Yet not a single
representation of a face – or anything else – has been found in the
archaeological record prior to the era of the cave paintings in Europe.
One might argue that an advanced culture is needed to foster such
creativity, but culture, I contend, is made possible by the capacity for
advanced
blending. In evolutionary terms, this capacity – and with it, the ability to
create representations of our ideas – emerged fairly recently. And once it
did, it changed practically everything.
Blends like the idea of the lion man can mislead us into thinking that
blending is strange, rare and noticeable. On the contrary, it happens all the
time, with most of it invisible to consciousness, proceeding quickly in the
powerful backstage of cognition, where we can manage complex operations
far beyond the capacity of consciousness.
Let's take an everyday example: the cyclic day. In our experience, there
is one day and then another day and so on, in a sequence that stretches out
indefinitely, forward and backward. The days in that sequence are all quite
different. They don't repeat. But day after day after day, indefinitely,
is too much to comprehend, too much to fit inside our working memory. It
isn't mentally portable. So we blend these different days into a conception of
a cyclic day.
There are analogies and disanalogies across the different days we
experience. The analogies are packed into one thing in the blend: the day. The
disanalogies are packed into change for that thing: the day starts over every
dawn and repeats – in other words it is cyclic. Because of blending, all the
days that have ever happened or will happen can be packed into a tight,
tractable, manageable, human-scale idea – the cyclic day.
The cyclic day isn't just an abstraction. There is new stuff in the blend
that isn't in any of the individual days in the mental web to which the
blend can be applied. Indeed, almost no blend consists exclusively of a
structure that is equally shared by all the ideas upon which the blend draws.
The
concept of the lion man, for example, is not an abstraction of what is
common to the concepts of "lion" and "man".
The ideas blended in our minds often contain sharp differences. And yet,
far from blocking new ideas, these impossibilities seem to create them.
Consider the sentence "If I were my brother-in-law, I would be miserable". This
sentence mixes up his intentionality and mine, his identity and mine, yet
our talent for advanced blending allows us to understand this complex mix of
causation, intentionality and participants.
Blending is a mental tool that cultures must sometimes deploy for a long
time to achieve specific blends or generic blending templates. This process
has resulted in art, science, religion, mathematics, language, writing,
fashion, advanced social cognition and a host of other creative human
activities. Thus, although advanced blending is probably a fairly recent
development in human evolution, and a small step in itself, it transformed the
human
mind. It didn't make us human so much as give us the ability to make
ourselves human, an ongoing and dynamic process, stretching over the vast scope
of human meaning.
This article appeared in print under the headline "The ideas factory"
Mark Turner is institute professor in the department of cognitive science
at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and author of The
Origin of Ideas: Blending, creativity and the human spark (Oxford University
Press)
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