Social Brain, Distributed Mind

TRAMA

This volume explores how hominin 'brains' became recognisably human 'minds', comparing perspectives from the humanities, social, and biological sciences. New ideas associated with the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind, allow us to envisage what might have happened in this crucial phase leading up to modern humans.

NOTE EDITORE

To understand who we are and why we are, we need to understand both modern humans and the ancestral stages that brought us to this point. The core to that story has been the role of evolving cognition -the social brain - in mediating the changes in behaviour that we see in the archaeological record. This volume brings together two powerful approaches - the social brain hypothesis and the concept of the distributed mind. The volume compares perspectives on these two approaches from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, psychology, philosophy, sociology and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. A particular focus is on the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost three million years of artefact and tool uses provides the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, social networks and the politics of local, everyday interaction in small-world societies. A second focus is on how, during the course of hominin evolution, increasingly large spatially distributed communities created stresses that threatened social cohesion. This volume offers the possibility of new insights into the evolution of human cognition and social lives that will further our understanding of the relationship between mind and world.

SOMMARIO

1 - The Social Brain and its Distributed Mind2 - Technologies of Separation and the Evolution of Social Extension3 - Herto Brains and Minds: Behaviour of Early Homo Sapiens from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia4 - Social Complexity and the Importance of Indirect Relationships: Social Networks in Primates5 - Fission-Fusion Behaviour in Chimpanzees and Hunter-Gatherers6 - Constraints on Social Networks7 - Social Networks and Community in the Viking Age8 - Deacon's Dilemma: the Problem of Pairbonding in Human Evolution9 - The Evolution of Altruism via Social Addiction10 - From Experiential-Based to Relational-Based forms of Social Organization: a Major Transition in the Evolution of Homo Sapiens11 - Networks and the Evolution of Socio-Material Differentiation12 - When Individuals Do Not Stop at the Skin13 - Cliques, Coalitions, Comrades, and Colleagues: Sources of Cohesion in Groups14 - Evolutionary Signalling Theory and Religion: Recent Advances and Future Directions15 - Some Functions of Collective Forgetting16 - Consciousness and Culture17 - Firing up the Intellect18 - Multi-Tasking and the Social Brain in Middle Pleistocene Africa19 - The Archaeology of Group Size20 - Fragmenting Hominins and the Presencing of Early Palaeolithic Social Worlds21 - Small Worlds, Material Culture and Ancient Near Eastern Social Networks22 - Brain, Mind and Material Culture in Evolutionary Perspective

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780197264522
• Collana: Proceedings of the British Academy
• Dimensioni: 241 x 33.8 x 168 mm Ø 1130 gr
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pagine Arabe: 548