Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 37

Individuals buy in to (their) community…by eternal psychological vigilance. They may spend time apparently doing nothing, passing time in idle gossip. But this time spent socialising is as crucial to their survival as any time spent hunting or gathering in the field. For it is round the campfire or lying out in the sun that the social backbone of…society is laid down and, if necessary, repaired: friendships are established, problems talked out, plans hatched, love affairs commented on.

Nicholas Humphrey35

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a chimpanzee kept in solitude is not a real chimpanzee at all.

Wolfgang Kohler

The brain-mind’s retrieval problems obviously get more acute the more different scenarios you have to keep tabs on. A solitary animal has only a few different types of situation that it has to take part in. Sociable animals such as fish and birds may also have only a limited number of roles to play as they do not make many distinctions between other members of the group. Animals such as the large cats that hunt in packs have to be rather more concerned about their roles and relationships.

But it is when we get to the social primates, and our own human ancestors, the early hominids, that the number of different scenarios which each individual has to keep track of begins to mushroom. The nature of each encounter becomes increasingly dependent on the particular individual you are dealing with. And if you have to have a separate minitheory for every member of your community, the larger and more complex that community becomes, the more the fragmentation of the brain-mind is likely to become a problem. (When we get on to the complexities of modern industrialized human society, the extent of the problem becomes staggering.) If each of our familiar scenarios were stored separately, there would be an enormous duplication of effort, and an incredible waste of usable information.