The privacy afforded by walls represented a truly revolutionary extension of the mind, maintains John Locke, professor of linguistics at Lehman College of the City University of New York. “Our distant ancestors could see each other at all times, which kept them safe but also imposed a huge cognitive cost,” he notes. “When residential walls were erected, they eliminated the need to look around every few seconds to see what others were doing.” The result, he says, was that “a human vigil, one beginning with ancestors that we share with apes, was reduced to manageable proportions, freeing up many
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Privacy, secrecy, doors, cryptography, and locks define individualists as we now all are.
