Abstract
Humans leverage material forms for unique cognitive purposes: We recruit and incorporate them into our cognitive system, exploit them to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort, and use them to recreate phenotypic change in new individuals and generations. These purposes are exemplified by writing, a relatively recent tool that has become highly adept at eliciting specific psychological and behavioral responses in its users, capability it achieved by changing in ways that facilitated, accumulated, and distributed incremental behavioral and psychological change between individuals and generations. Writing is described here as a self-organizing system whose design features reflect points of maximal usefulness that emerged under sustained collective use of the tool. Such self-organization may hold insights applicable to human cognitive evolution and tool use more generally. Accordingly, this article examines the emergence of the ability to leverage material forms for cognitive purposes, using the tool-using behaviors and lithic technologies of ancestral species and contemporary non-human primates as proxies for matters like collective use, generational sustainment, and the non-teleological emergence of design features.
Highlights
What differentiates human cognition from that of every other species? As neuroscientist Christof Koch recently observed, there is ‘‘no simple brain-centric explanation’’ for our putative cognitive supremacy—not the size of our brain, nor the number or type of its neurons (Koch, 2019)
Intensification of the features of stones used as tools is typically interpreted as users acquiring greater skill in manufacturing techniques and investing greater effort in making the usable features more pronounced. This would undoubtedly have been the case, but the intensification of the features of stone tool used by early hominins might be a matter of form emerging as a byproduct of use
Intensification means more than the shape a core gradually assumes as flakes are removed; it means the emergence of features like sharp edges and grips as matters related to the functions and purposes to which the tool is applied
Summary
What differentiates human cognition from that of every other species? As neuroscientist Christof Koch recently observed, there is ‘‘no simple brain-centric explanation’’ for our putative cognitive supremacy—not the size of our brain, nor the number or type of its neurons (Koch, 2019). Topological recognition; tolerance for ambiguity; greater use of global cues; productive standardization, automaticity, and speed; and the recapitalization of freed cognitive resources are only some of the many behavioral and psychological developments that enabled the material form of writing to lose its depictiveness, detail, and clarity and intensify its useful features (Figure 3). This systemic change appears to have yielded literacy, or something analogous to the state we Figure 3. This iterative process of change through sustained interaction is how the material form was able to facilitate, accumulate, and distribute incremental behavioral and psychological change
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
