Cognitive Gadgets
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Academic Monograph
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Precis of
the book with commentaries and author’s response: |
We humans have created not just physical machines—such as pulleys, traps, carts, and internal combustion engines—but also mental machines; mechanisms of thought, embodied in our nervous systems, that enable our minds to go further, faster, and in different directions than the minds of other animals. These distinctively human cognitive mechanisms include causal understanding, episodic memory, imitation, mindreading, normative thinking, and many more. They are “gadgets”, rather than “instincts”, because, like many physical devices, they are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution. New cognitive mechanisms—different ways of thinking—have emerged, not by genetic mutation, but by innovations in cognitive development. These novelties have been passed on to subsequent generations, not via genes, but through social learning: people with a new cognitive mechanism passed it onto others through social interaction. And some of the new ways of thinking have spread through human populations, while others have died out, because the holders had more “students”, not just more “babies”. |
| Summary for General Readership | |
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Cognitive gadgets - how culture works with evolution to produce human
cognition. Aeon, 17 April 2019 |
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| Reviews and Responses | |
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Acta Biotheoretica - Mark Stanford
American Journal of Psychology - Bill Rowe (in press) |
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The Enlightened Economist - Diane Coyle |
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Mind and Language – Three essay reviews
Daniel Dor, Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka; Aida Roige & Peter Carruthers;
Olivier Morin and response from
Cecilia Heyes |
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| Interviews | |
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Celia Heyes on Cognitive Gadgets.
Social Science Bites, June 2018 |
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