The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

Kuhl theorizes, an infant's mind looks for patterns in the sounds she hears, locking into the more frequent sound patterns. As time goes on, the infant becomes increasingly adept at distinguishing the sound patterns of her own language and ignoring those that don't fit into the patterns she's already identified. This amounts to strong evidence that humans in fact possess a patterning instinct rather than a language instinct.

Not language instinct but patterning

language is not just about sounds; it's also about symbols and meaning. Is it possible that language shapes our perception, not just of the sounds we hear, but of the very symbols we perceive as having meaning? If this is the case, it implies that language may have been instrumental in shaping how we think, perhaps even how the connections evolved within our brains.

Can language shape our perception?

Those infants whose PFCs were able to make the best connections would be more successful at realizing how the complex mélange of grunts, rhythms, gestures, and expressions around them patterned themselves into social meaning. As they grew up, they would be better integrated within their community and, as such, more likely to pass on their genes for enhanced PFC connectivity to the next generation.

PFC and the connectivity to the next generation

in a groundbreaking book published in 1980, cognitive philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show how virtually every aspect of our normal speech uses hidden metaphors to communicate abstract ideas and concepts.

Cognitive philosopher

Without the use of metaphor, we are simply unable to conceptualize and communicate abstract thoughts about feelings or ideas.

Conceptualise the abstract

A couple of startling implications arise from this epic journey. The first is that all non-Africans alive today are descendants of the small group that made its way across the Red Sea. Second, because of this, there is far wider genetic diversity among different African populations than among all other non-Africans on the planet.7

The implications of 'out of africa'.

Once you understand that those around you are thinking and feeling people like you, a disturbing crescendo of implications is likely to occur in your mind when somebody dies. It's clear that the life force previously animating that person has vanished. As that happens to those around you, you soon realize this will eventually be your own fate, leading to profound dread at the inevitable future reality of your own death.

Tragedy of cgniton. The realisation of death.and religion

Bronislaw Malinowski theorized that religion is the “affirmation that death is not real, that man has a soul and that this is immortal,” which has since inspired a school of thought called “terror management theory.” In this view, just as an infant gains comfort and security from the authority of her parents, so as she grows up and becomes aware of death, she is comforted by the notion of deities, who are frequently patriarchal or matriarchal figures.

Wow. The reason why religion."terror management theory"

As infants, we quickly learn that people can disappear and then reappear, sometimes minutes, hours, or even days later. From this, we realize that people continue to exist even while they have disappeared. This soon becomes an essential ingredient of our social intelligence,

Interesting angle.infant perspectives of people coming ang going

If we're home alone on a dark, stormy night and hear a door creaking open in the other room, our first reaction is fear that it might be an intruder, not the thought that it's just the wind blowing the door open. We have, explains anthropologist Scott Atran, “a naturally selected cognitive mechanism for detecting agents—such as predators, protectors, and prey.” It's clear how this served a powerful evolutionary purpose: there's no harm in mistaking the wind for an intruder, but mistaking an intruder for the wind could cost you your life.23

Anthropomorphic .thunderclap

A New Theory of Religion, argues that “anthropomorphism may best be explained as the result of an attempt to see not what we want to see or what is easy to see, but what is important to see: what may affect us for better or worse.” Because of our powerful anthropomorphic tendency, “we search everywhere, involuntarily and unknowingly, for human form and results of human action, and often seem to find them where they do not exist.”

Anthropomorphic Tendency

In the diverse cultures of the world, gods come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they always share is a mind with the ability to think symbolically, just like a human. This makes sense in light of the critical importance of theory of mind in the development of our social intelligence: if other people have minds like ours, wouldn't that be true of other agents we perceive to act intentionally in the natural world?

Wow.Anthropomorphism application to god and spirits

The cognitive processes of toolmaking, for example, by which things were designed and constructed for a particular purpose, may have inspired the belief that natural objects were also created for a purpose. Similarly, the intuitive sense of fairness that was crucial to the stability of hunter-gatherer societies would have implied the need to maintain equally harmonious relationships with the spirits of the natural world.

Intuitive sense of fairness

Just as language shapes the perception of an infant as she listens to the patterns of sounds around her, so the mythic patterns of thought informing the culture a child is born into will literally shape how that child constructs meaning in his world. Every culture holds its own worldview: a complex and comprehensive model of how the universe works and how to act within it. This network of beliefs and values determines the way in which each child in that culture makes sense of his universe.

With language forms culture

As the infant gets used to certain behaviors, such as grasping, nursing, or cooing, the synaptic junctions that enable a successful behavior get strengthened by increased usage. The connections that are never used gradually wither away. As the infant grows, this synaptic reinforcement continues until some pathways are massively strengthened, while countless others that turned out to be useless have died out.

Neuronal connections die away when unused. Strengthened when constant stimulated.synaptic pruning

It's through this process that we arrive at the notion of culture as sculptor. We can think of each distinct culture as the cumulative network of meaning constructed by countless generations of minds within a given tradition. The neural network of each person born into that tradition is sculpted by the previous accumulation of meanings and then may contribute its own unique interpretations to modify the culture incrementally for the next generation.

Culture sculptor. Enculturation

Every human interaction subtly shapes the neural network of a growing child as she learns to integrate into her culture. The words her parents speak to her, their responses to different behaviors, the games she plays, the rituals she participates in are all continually sculpting her own perception of the world, shaping how she patterns meaning into the universe.

Details. Culture

examples include cave art, sculptures, personal ornamentation, and musical instruments, but external symbolic storage can also refer to more subtle symbolic signaling, such as stonework styles and even the spatial patterns of how a campsite is used.32 Through external symbolic storage, culture no longer resides merely in the shared network of people's minds. It has taken up permanent residence in a set of concrete symbols that remain fixed, outliving those who constructed them and communicating stable symbolic meaning to countless new generations.

External symbolic storage. Objects for communications

The biological memory records created within the brain, Donald explains, “are impermanent, small, hard to refine, impossible to display in awareness for any length of time, and difficult to locate and recall…. In contrast, external symbols give us stable, permanent, virtually unlimited memory records.”

Biological symbols and external ones

We no longer know what the Lascaux Cave paintings symbolize. But it is their relatively fixed nature that gives external symbolic storage the power to influence each new generation of human minds.

Cant know what it means anymore. "fixed nature" does the job

Without external symbolic storage, human civilization could never have developed. However, its power severely limits the autonomy each of us has in constructing our own pattern of meaning from the world

Interesting. The limiting factor of external storage object

Like an alien force from a sci-fi movie, our culture maintains its existence outside any one of us and yet, at the same time, pervades our minds. While its tangible expressions affect our daily lives, its ultimate power derives from the intangible conceptualizations that lie below, out of sight. The abstract concepts of culture have shaped the course of world history more profoundly than any of its physical manifestations.

The existence of our culture

Going back to the analogy of the brain's neural organization as a field of tall grass: even after the main thoroughfares have been laid down, it's still possible to find new ways through the bush. Finding a different pathway through the tall grass can be inconvenient, messy, and even scary, so it's something you'll do only if you discover the old paths no longer lead you to places you want to go.

You can still change course. Just messy at first

Their languages and the specific attributes of their environment differ drastically: one culture may be oriented around a river, another around the migration of a particular animal. But many decades of research have unearthed what anthropologist Bruce Trigger calls “cross-cultural uniformities in human behavior.” The uniformities tend to exist under the surface, leading to underlying patterns of thought that are remarkably similar across cultures, even while their manifestations in each culture's beliefs and practices are profusely variable.

Cross cultural uniformity in behavior

This interweaving of earth, spirits, and family is shared by hunter-gatherer societies across the world.

Interesting.interweaving

extensive studies have shown similar practices occurring in virtually every forager community worldwide. The significance of shamanism goes beyond its hunter-gatherer origins: it influenced agrarian cultures around the world, and elements of it can be seen in Indian Yoga, certain practices of ancient Chinese culture, and in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica.

Prevalence around the world. Similarities

Foragers, Sahlins argued, follow the “Zen road to affluence” because they need very little and they don't have to work too hard to get it. Further research on the !Kung people provided concrete evidence for Sahlins's viewpoint, showing that each adult !Kung typically spends only two to three hours a day on the basic needs of food and shelter.

"zen strategy" . Zen road to affluence

Foragers tend to enjoy a wide variety of food sources providing sufficient amounts of protein, vitamins, and minerals. Early farmers, on the other hand, would often concentrate on a few principal crops that grew more readily, providing a narrower range of nutritional needs. Also, for a farmer, a crop failure might result in famine, whereas foragers could simply move to someplace else where another food source was more plentiful.

Plentifulness of forager life. Different food sources

early hunter-gatherers enjoyed a life virtually free of infectious disease. Most diseases that became endemic, such as plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, or cholera, were originally acquired by humans from their farm animals, and the diseases only achieved critical mass on account of the high population densities of towns and cities that sprang up following the rise of agriculture.

Inustriallised farming life is disease inflicting

Rather than boasting about his kill, the hunter is expected to announce, “Ah, I'm no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all…just a little tiny one,” while the group that carries the meat back to camp cries out, “You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here in order to make us cart home your pile of bones?” Lee's informant explained to him how this elaborate, counterintuitive ritual is designed to prevent the rise of arrogance in a hunter:

!kung normal response to new hunts

“When a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

!kung social etiquette

We can see from this story how behavior that, at first sight, seems bizarre is actually a sophisticated form of social engineering that promotes sustainable community living.

Unreasonable might be at first. There is deeper meaning behind

It's not surprising that the Pirahã treated the old man with such respect, given what we know of the hunter-gatherer worldview. After all, when he died, he would become one of the ancestral spirits watching them in the forest. We can see here how the mutual reciprocity informing a hunter-gatherer's relationship with other members of the group becomes the basis for their relationship with the spirit world.

Why insult to gifts and hunt

common principle that emerges from each aspect of the hunter-gatherer worldview is the blurring of boundaries between domains. Whether it's between the living and dead, the everyday and the spirit world, human and animal, owning and giving, or family and nonfamily, fluidity in relations is a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies. Even the bond between husband and wife or parent and child is characterized by this lack of clear boundaries.

Connected and boundless

Imagine two early forager societies fighting each other, with one group of fighters only looking out for themselves, while the other group consists of fighters willing to risk their own lives for the sake of their community. It's not hard to imagine how the group-oriented fighters would be more successful in battle.

The altruistic would become dominant and be responsible for migration. And distinctive cooperative behaviour among homo sapien

One researcher has calculated that hunting down and killing juvenile megafauna at rates as low as one kill per person per decade would have led to these massive species extinctions over a period of several thousand years. From the foragers’ perspective, nature's bounty would have seemed limitless.

The speed and limit

Sedentism is the name given to the lifestyle of living in permanent dwellings, and it's considered by many to have been the most important step in prehistory.

The ability to storage.farm.Plan ahead."delayed return".change of ideology. Private ownership. And lack of altruism

Attitudes toward time begin to change: the past (when you accumulated your goods) and the future (when you might need them) become more important, replacing a simple, consistent focus on the present. Attitudes toward work also shift: rather than doing just what you need to feed yourself that day, there's an incentive to work harder to invest in the future. This all leads to a changed view of nature, with people relying on their own planning and storage rather than an ever-providing natural world.

Change of attitude.not based on daily needs but future

A similar dynamic occurred with the wild dogs, goats, sheep, and cattle that became domesticated. In each case, humans would select the smaller and gentler animals, and, over generations, these genetic traits would predominate until the species became too weak to survive by itself in the wild. Now, humans were responsible for protecting these domesticated animals from predators, something their wild predecessors had been able to do for themselves.

Human once had the freedom but they have to care for the weak plants and animals they rely on

Archaeologist Gordon Childe set the tone for the debate in the early twentieth century with a theory known as ex oriente lux, or “light from the Near East.” In his view, over thousands of years, farmers from Southwest Asia colonized Europe, bringing their domesticated plants and animals along with ceramics and tools. The hunter-gatherers already there could do very little to resist the advance.

Conquerered foragers

The very word “agriculture” suggests a radically new process where the wild field (ager) is cultured and turned into a human construct.

Ager

Archaeologist Jacques Cauvin sees this cognitive shift as the most important aspect of the rise of agriculture, calling it the Symbolic Revolution. He points to the transition in Southwest Asia, after the emergence of agriculture, from circular dwellings to square and rectangular houses. The natural world is filled with circular or curved shapes, but squares and rectangles are almost entirely human constructions. Once villages became permanent, those born into these settlements would have developed a new view of human patterns and structures as different from the unruly patterns of the wild.

Agriculture and the beginning of squares and rectangles.symbolic revolution

Along with squares and rectangles, boundary lines emerge, separating not just farmland from the wild but also one farmer's landholding from another. The land itself—previously free—becomes a valuable asset, permitting those who own it to become even wealthier by growing more crops. Wealth becomes an intrinsic value, and those who don't have any are seen as worthless. Significant hierarchical inequalities emerged over the first few thousand years of agriculture.

Wow. With the concept of shape. Boundary and ownership took form

In an agrarian society, however, someone who has spent his life building up wealth and prestige doesn't want to see it all evaporate on his death. The issue of inheritance emerges, requiring rules for how possessions get passed from one generation to the next. The authority of the patriarch becomes paramount. Women are perceived as commodities, like land and food sources, that males can utilize to further enhance their wealth into the distant future, even beyond their own life span. New values emphasizing hitherto unknown concepts of honor, virginity, and sexual fidelity now become major issues dominating people's lives.

Wow.everything became property after the concept of inheritance .agricultural.social status.sexuality.

This led, in the words of archaeologist Graeme Barker, to “a very different kind of spirituality characterized by a separation from and distrust of nature,” which generated “the anxiety over cosmic disorder that seems to lie at the core of all the agrarian religions.” No longer was nature a generous, giving parent; instead, it was increasingly something to “control and appropriate rather than be part of.”24

The cosmos felt different afterwards.theme of control became central

The theme of control becomes central. On the one hand, the very idea of agriculture opens the possibility of humans controlling their destiny through their actions. On the other hand, the parameters under human control remain painfully limited. A sure recipe for distress. Agrarian views of the universe arise directly from the habitual patterns of agricultural life—and, as a result, the twin themes of control and anxiety are never far away.

Control and anxiety

As humans exerted increasing control over other animals, their gods took on a more human form. In older forager times, deities were associated primarily with animals. When shamans journeyed to other worlds, their spirits would take on the forms of those animals. But, as early as the Natufians, images of animals began to be superseded by human forms, primarily female “mother goddess” figurines.

From animal gods to human gods

“The theme of the ‘supplicant’ introduces an entirely new relationship between god and man…a new distinction at the heart of the human imagination between an ‘above’ and a ‘below’, between an order of a divine force, personified and dominant, and that of an everyday humanity.”

Supplicant.above and below

Gone are the days of nature as mother and father providing food unconditionally to their children. Instead, nature now provides food only in return for the right conduct. If the ancestral spirits receive the correct sacrifices given with the appropriate rituals, they will reward their descendants with a good harvest. If not, they might cause the crops to fail in retribution.

Above and below.the complexity of human society is reflected

it became increasingly difficult to conceive of deities existing only in the natural world. How could people now communicate with them? The emergence of idols solved this problem. Now, just as a natural object such as a tree could hold a divine essence, an idol could too.27 Everyone, from peasant to king, had a part to play in this elaborate network of cosmos, society, and individual. No role was more crucial than that of the king, who, by performing the required rituals, could maintain the order of the cosmos—which, in turn, transferred to political and social stability.

Wow.then it comes down to the delegate of communication.Idols