The sapient paradox: can cognitive neuroscience solve it?

Abstract

What makes the human mind unique? One answer would be our particular kind of culture, which might be called ‘mindsharing’ culture. Human beings are not only able to detect the existence of other minds, and to understand that those minds have beliefs, but are also able to form networks of trust built around shared intentions and beliefs. No other species does anything like this. Much current research in neuroscience is aimed at understanding the processes that contribute to our construction of culture. Recognizing the importance of integrating this work into their research, and of drawing neuroscientists into more collaboration, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge initiated a conference in September 2007, devoted to the theme ‘Archaeology meets neuroscience’. A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is now devoted to the proceedings of that pioneering meeting. Although understandably selective, this volume contains a smorgasbord of current ideas and research from philosophy, psychology, anthropology and archaeology. The selection of papers is diverse and stimulating. This relatively new marriage of disciplines still lacks a unifying framework, but one must start somewhere, and no time like the present. A major link between archaeology and neuroscience is provided by cognitive science, which has a foot in both camps. Some aspects of cognition, such as literacy, mathematics and music are obviously cultural in origin. Others, such as attention, perception and action stem directly from the design of the central nervous system. These two influences, brain and culture, work together in forming human cognition, and cognitive scientists find themselves in the position of having to explain many of the higher cognitive capabilities of human beings in terms of hybrid brain-culture mechanisms. Evolutionary models are one important way of ordering the evidence on hybrid mechanisms, and epigenetic factors may …