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A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780195159073
ISBN: 0195159071
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: April 01, 2004
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Review:
This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. When you can't think about the future in much detail, you are trapped in a here-and-now existence with no "What if" and "Why me?" William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again.
The mind's big bang came long after our brain size stopped enlarging. Calvin suggests that the development of long sentences--what modern children do in their third year--was the most likely trigger. To keep a half-dozen concepts from blending together like a summer drink, you need some mental structuring. In saying "I think I saw him leave to go home," you are nesting three sentences inside a fourth. We also structure plans, play games with rules, create structured music and chains of logic, and have a fascination with discovering how things hang together. Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before.
Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored in the ice ages? We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out driving them, going faster than we can react effectively.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Savannah spear chucker to Shakespeare
Always a lively and informative read, Calvin has capped his many fine works on the human intellect with this book. Never hesitant to propose novel ideas, he incorporates fresh thinking on the cause of our consciousness. "Stories around the campfire" depicts his theme - the campfire for cooking meat and the narratives exchanged among the diners. The meat implies hunting and the conversation implies speech and complex thinking. Only humans engage in these practices - how did that come to be? In ... Read More
Rating:  - NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME
For a short book, (fewer than 200 pages), Dr. Calvin provides a wealth of information from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, and a HUGE bibliography. He approaches evolutionary cognitive development from the standpoint of a neurobiologist.
He has excellent, entertaining quotes to begin and finish many chapters, and nice illustrations. He provides brief (one paragraph) chapter summaries in the Table of Contents. I read that first, and reread individual chapter summaries ... Read More
Rating: - The rise of "beyond the apes" intelligence
The central event in this book is the human mind's so-called "big bang" which occurred some 90,000 to 50,000 years ago.
(These are neurobiologist William Calvin's numbers from page 111 where he notes that "it now appears that humans were behaviorally modern before the last great Out of Africa" which is now understood as taking place between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, as determined by the latest tweaking of the mitochondrial DNA dating data.)
Professor Calvin leads up to this ... Read More
Rating:  - Interesting to a weekend "scientist"
Dr. Calvin has done an excellent job detailing the history of how mind development may have transpired over the last several hundred thousand years. While I have no formal education on the subject, I was able to easily comprehend and enjoy most of the book. There are a few chapter towards the middle and the end where he seems to go off on technical tangents that are rather dull and long winded. But the first several chapters concerning early forms of the mind are incredibly enlightening and make for good ... Read More
Rating: - Thought provoking yet personable
This is a thought provoking yet personable survey of the evolution of our species' mental abilities. I read it after I'd written my book, "Concept: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics", else I might have used some of his ideas in my chapters eight and nine (I do reference two of his earlier books). He elaborates and illustrates many of the concepts (tho' sometimes he uses `concept' were I'd use `percept'). However he largely ignores the functions of the pre-, sub- and un-conscious, yet speculates ... Read More
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