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Intelligence, abstract thought and the ability to reflect on our own existence are the qualities that make us human and for a long time have been considered unique to our species. This year’s International Science Festival in Gothenburg looks at what happens in our brains when we think: the invisible but magical processes that occur as pieces fall into place, doors are opened, insights arise and we experience the feeling of self. It’s about how our identity and personality are rooted in our thoughts, but at the same time we are ingenious machines that can work out how to build houses and machines, understand the cosmos and save lives, and come up with the most imaginative and creative ideas. So what happens when we transfer the thinking process to machines and robots, and the I is no longer always human? What happens if the machines become more intelligent than we are? Are we standing at the dawn of a golden era or are we approaching the last outpost of humanity? This year we investigate astonishing thought and the importance of technology for human development.As a researcher, I have specialized in prospective thinking, e.g. leadership and social creativity for Problem-Solving (Österberg,2004, 2012).
Currently, I'm assigned to a research project about the Future of Agriculture, from a perspective of entrepreneurial thinking at the University of Helsingfors.
The human mind, which is what the brain does, is an astonishing program or "machine", where interactions between declarative and non-declarative memory structures and perceptions convey information forward in time. The latter means prospection and means prediction, intention, simulation, and planning (Szpunar et al.2014).
My first talk was called The Brains Astonishing and Creative History (Hjärnans häpnadsväckande och kreativa historia). Because the venue originally was planned as a conversation, where my part was to answer questions, I had no manuscript. And as my speaking-partner had to pull out at the last minute for family issues, I had no choice but to improvise.
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| Picture 1. Löwenmensch figurine or Lion-man (Link). |
We, the presenters, had planned to use one image - The lion-man (Picture 1, above) - which is one of the first manifestations of creativity/innovation, and which dates some 40 000 - 35 000 years back in time. That means that the people who carved the figurine must have been skilled in their profession [of carving figurines], but more importantly, having the ability to use imagery to mentally create concepts out of non-related objects. The big question is: when did this ability emerge?
That is of course a hard question to answer. And in order to do that, my take is to go back in time to the starting point of the human lineage.
There are several theories about the starting point of the human lineage. One theory suggest that we originate from Orronin man who lived in Tugen Hills between Lake Victoria in Uganda and Lake Turkana in Kenya.
Ororin man dates some 6 million years before the present (Pickford, 2006; Reynolds Gallagher, 2012; Senut, Pickford, Gommery Mein Cheboi and Coppens, 2001).
For the first 2.5 million years, not much happened from a neurological point of view.
Findings from the Afar region in northern Ethiopia suggests that our ancestors started to eat bone marrow ca 3.5 million years before the present (McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2018).
Previous common knowledge was that our ancestors turned into meat-eaters when the climate changed, from Pliocene (5.3-2.58 Mya) to Pleistocene (2.58 Mya to 11,700 years ago) (Morley, 2016; Pobiner, 2013 Zaraska, 2016).
This new nutrient dense diet caused a reduction of their guts and expansion of their brains (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995).
Daniel Everett, anthropologist, and linguist suggest that our ancestors had developed a rudimentary language 1.8-1.5 million years ago, and that they may have used it for problem-solving in a social setting (Davis, 2018).
True or not, at this time, social cognition emerged. That followed by symbolic thinking (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018). Note. Language is noise used to transfer symbolic information from one mind to another mind.
320 000 years before the present our ancestors had emerged on the scene (Villoare et al. 2015).
Findings show that around 100 000 - 35 000 years before present, our ancestors brains were rewired (Neubauer et al. 2018).
Ambrose (2010) suggests that ~ 70 000 before present, constructive memory (Schacter and Addis, 2007) emerged. That coincided with the emergence of a new version of Homo Sapiens: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The first manifestation of this new constructive or combinatory thinking was the Lion-man (see image above).
Creativity is defined as a common cognitive ability to combine, blend, or meld, declarative, and non-declarative abstractions into new concepts (Österberg, 2012; Ricord, 1840; Wynn, Coolidge and Bright, 2009).
We then continued our discussion at such length, that the organizers had to ask us to leave before the alarm bell would go off. We took to the street and found a bar where the conversation continued.
My second talk the day after was called Creativity - an Astonishing thought (Kreativitet - en enastående tanke).
The starting point was the latest in mobile technology - a phone that could be bent or folded. I suggested that this is partly based on creativity and partly development. But who knows?
I went on to enlighten the audience about one of the bent phones predecessor - Motorola Micro Tac (MMT; 1989-1995).
MMT was 23 centimeters, had an eight-digit screen, and cost 2500-3500 dollars, that is twice of current top models of today.
Besides knowing that the MMT was available in Honolulu-white, the big question is: where did the ability to build such complex artifacts come from?
The story went the same way as in the previous presentation: Orrorin man, meat-eating, language for cooperation to solve complex problems.
Then, I mentioned that our ancestors used music and dancing as replacement for grooming; research on entrainment, which, simplified, is to be in sync, show that when people are in the same musical rhythm, there is less conflict. Also, research shows that dancing may work as a facilitator for openness for experience, which is one explanation for creativity (Lovatt; Österberg and Köping Olsson, paper in progress).
Then back to the 100 000 - 70 000 years breakthrough of the executive functions, which is suggested to be the starting point for creativity.
40 - 35' years ago, Lion-man is created, demonstrating the ability to combine or meld abstractions into new concepts.
11 700, another climate change emerged, when Pleistocene was replaced by Holocene - the weather became warmer and more stable. With human capacity to meld abstractions into new concepts, a group of people in south-east Anatolia, to the border of Syria, took the chance to invent agriculture.
This was not a success story, rather the opposite; people got shorter, equality between men and women vanished, and the hierarchical society we know of today emerged (Davis, 2018).
Agriculture spread in many directions, and when reaching the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black sea, the wheel and the wagon was invented by the Yamnaya culture. This culture reach northern Europe, which possibly is one part of the explanation for the success of the western culture?
As high culture moved north from Anatolia, Florence became the capital of Europe in late medieval time. Remember, neither Italy or tomatoes did yet exist in the area.
Sometime during twelfth century, an architect named Neri di Fioravante, constructed a 44 diametric round self-supporting dome for the cathedral of Florence. But no-one had the knowledge to build the dome.
In 1418, a competition was announced, and a goldsmith by the name Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) suggested he could build the dome. Long story short, Brunelleschi got the job, which is said to have started the renaissance, and the dome is still standing.
With enlightenment, humanism, science, and reasoning took to the scene (Pinker, 2018), and as a result, numerous thinkers could manifest their ideas. In 1840, Elisabeth Ricord (1788-1865) wrote:
In the 1950s, under the management of Clarence "Kelly" Johnson (1910 – 1990), the development of high tech reconnaissance aircraft was initiated, including the infamous SR-71 blackbird (1964-1998).
The US military also ignited research projects like augmented computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Markoff, 2006). Even though AI is not yet fully developed, most people use a handheld computer to support everyday administration.
In a time when poverty is at a record low, and democracy is at a record high, we still have challenges. One is the trinity of climate, sustainability, and the environment.
Global climate emissions are some 40 % higher than expected (NASA). Adding to that, the oceans are polluted with plastics. Some claim that the life-style of the western world is to blame, and that meat should be banned for plant-based alternatives in order to lower emissions, save the environment, and live more sustainable.
But direct emission from livestock in the western world is 1-3 %, and the plastic in the oceans originate from 10 rivers in Asia. And as Steven Pinker at Harvard said in his TED talk, emissions from the US has dropped significantly since 1988. A similar trend is true for Europe.
Exactly what way to go about to improve the 'trinity' and where, is not clear at the moment. But the development of the human mind offers a vehicle to develop solutions. Remember, one climate change made us meat-eaters. That led to extended executive functions. With another climate change, our ancestors invented agriculture, and later, the wheel and the wagon, and so forth. We probably need to use the same mental tools of prospection to create the many concepts needed for a sustainable future.
The post was originally posted on the University of Helsinki blog for my research project (2018-2021).
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).
That is of course a hard question to answer. And in order to do that, my take is to go back in time to the starting point of the human lineage.
There are several theories about the starting point of the human lineage. One theory suggest that we originate from Orronin man who lived in Tugen Hills between Lake Victoria in Uganda and Lake Turkana in Kenya.
Ororin man dates some 6 million years before the present (Pickford, 2006; Reynolds Gallagher, 2012; Senut, Pickford, Gommery Mein Cheboi and Coppens, 2001).
For the first 2.5 million years, not much happened from a neurological point of view.
Findings from the Afar region in northern Ethiopia suggests that our ancestors started to eat bone marrow ca 3.5 million years before the present (McPherron et al. 2010; Thompson et al. 2018).
Previous common knowledge was that our ancestors turned into meat-eaters when the climate changed, from Pliocene (5.3-2.58 Mya) to Pleistocene (2.58 Mya to 11,700 years ago) (Morley, 2016; Pobiner, 2013 Zaraska, 2016).
Our ancestors’ transition from herbivory to omnivory was, initially, a positive move. As Zaraska explains: “It enabled us to grow bigger brains, encouraged sharing and politics, and helped us move out of Africa and into colder climates.”Thompsons's et al. findings predate the introduction of animal-based food by 800,000 years.
This new nutrient dense diet caused a reduction of their guts and expansion of their brains (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995).
Daniel Everett, anthropologist, and linguist suggest that our ancestors had developed a rudimentary language 1.8-1.5 million years ago, and that they may have used it for problem-solving in a social setting (Davis, 2018).
True or not, at this time, social cognition emerged. That followed by symbolic thinking (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018). Note. Language is noise used to transfer symbolic information from one mind to another mind.
320 000 years before the present our ancestors had emerged on the scene (Villoare et al. 2015).
Findings show that around 100 000 - 35 000 years before present, our ancestors brains were rewired (Neubauer et al. 2018).
Ambrose (2010) suggests that ~ 70 000 before present, constructive memory (Schacter and Addis, 2007) emerged. That coincided with the emergence of a new version of Homo Sapiens: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The first manifestation of this new constructive or combinatory thinking was the Lion-man (see image above).
Creativity is defined as a common cognitive ability to combine, blend, or meld, declarative, and non-declarative abstractions into new concepts (Österberg, 2012; Ricord, 1840; Wynn, Coolidge and Bright, 2009).
We then continued our discussion at such length, that the organizers had to ask us to leave before the alarm bell would go off. We took to the street and found a bar where the conversation continued.
My second talk the day after was called Creativity - an Astonishing thought (Kreativitet - en enastående tanke).
The starting point was the latest in mobile technology - a phone that could be bent or folded. I suggested that this is partly based on creativity and partly development. But who knows?
I went on to enlighten the audience about one of the bent phones predecessor - Motorola Micro Tac (MMT; 1989-1995).
MMT was 23 centimeters, had an eight-digit screen, and cost 2500-3500 dollars, that is twice of current top models of today.
Besides knowing that the MMT was available in Honolulu-white, the big question is: where did the ability to build such complex artifacts come from?
The story went the same way as in the previous presentation: Orrorin man, meat-eating, language for cooperation to solve complex problems.
Then, I mentioned that our ancestors used music and dancing as replacement for grooming; research on entrainment, which, simplified, is to be in sync, show that when people are in the same musical rhythm, there is less conflict. Also, research shows that dancing may work as a facilitator for openness for experience, which is one explanation for creativity (Lovatt; Österberg and Köping Olsson, paper in progress).
Then back to the 100 000 - 70 000 years breakthrough of the executive functions, which is suggested to be the starting point for creativity.
40 - 35' years ago, Lion-man is created, demonstrating the ability to combine or meld abstractions into new concepts.
11 700, another climate change emerged, when Pleistocene was replaced by Holocene - the weather became warmer and more stable. With human capacity to meld abstractions into new concepts, a group of people in south-east Anatolia, to the border of Syria, took the chance to invent agriculture.
This was not a success story, rather the opposite; people got shorter, equality between men and women vanished, and the hierarchical society we know of today emerged (Davis, 2018).
Agriculture spread in many directions, and when reaching the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black sea, the wheel and the wagon was invented by the Yamnaya culture. This culture reach northern Europe, which possibly is one part of the explanation for the success of the western culture?
As high culture moved north from Anatolia, Florence became the capital of Europe in late medieval time. Remember, neither Italy or tomatoes did yet exist in the area.
Sometime during twelfth century, an architect named Neri di Fioravante, constructed a 44 diametric round self-supporting dome for the cathedral of Florence. But no-one had the knowledge to build the dome.
In 1418, a competition was announced, and a goldsmith by the name Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) suggested he could build the dome. Long story short, Brunelleschi got the job, which is said to have started the renaissance, and the dome is still standing.
With enlightenment, humanism, science, and reasoning took to the scene (Pinker, 2018), and as a result, numerous thinkers could manifest their ideas. In 1840, Elisabeth Ricord (1788-1865) wrote:
“The highest development of the Intellect is in the power it has of combining its conceptions, so as to form creations of its own; a world within itself. This is the province of Imagination” (Philosophy of the Mind (Elisabeth Ricord (1788-1865; 1840, p. 284).Almost twenty years later, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), published the infamous theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection, which was validated some 10 to 15 years later (1875).
In the 1950s, under the management of Clarence "Kelly" Johnson (1910 – 1990), the development of high tech reconnaissance aircraft was initiated, including the infamous SR-71 blackbird (1964-1998).
The US military also ignited research projects like augmented computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Markoff, 2006). Even though AI is not yet fully developed, most people use a handheld computer to support everyday administration.
In a time when poverty is at a record low, and democracy is at a record high, we still have challenges. One is the trinity of climate, sustainability, and the environment.
Global climate emissions are some 40 % higher than expected (NASA). Adding to that, the oceans are polluted with plastics. Some claim that the life-style of the western world is to blame, and that meat should be banned for plant-based alternatives in order to lower emissions, save the environment, and live more sustainable.
But direct emission from livestock in the western world is 1-3 %, and the plastic in the oceans originate from 10 rivers in Asia. And as Steven Pinker at Harvard said in his TED talk, emissions from the US has dropped significantly since 1988. A similar trend is true for Europe.
Exactly what way to go about to improve the 'trinity' and where, is not clear at the moment. But the development of the human mind offers a vehicle to develop solutions. Remember, one climate change made us meat-eaters. That led to extended executive functions. With another climate change, our ancestors invented agriculture, and later, the wheel and the wagon, and so forth. We probably need to use the same mental tools of prospection to create the many concepts needed for a sustainable future.
The post was originally posted on the University of Helsinki blog for my research project (2018-2021).
Please support the blog via Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Finland).
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