The Mind in the Cave Quotes

“Scientists do not collect data randomly and utterly comprehensively. The data they collect are only those that they consider *relevant* to some hypothesis or theory.”
― David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“If researchers seek only the kinds of order with which Westerners are today familiar, they will miss, or reject as disorder, all other orders.”
― David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“the essence of being human is an uncomfortable duality of ‘rational’ technology and ‘irrational’ belief. We are still a species in transition. The unknown person of Time-Byte I had the rational, ‘scientific’ knowledge and skill to make a tallow lamp and also a set of beliefs that were the imperative for his or her apparently irrational underground journey. That duality in human behaviour did not disappear at the end of the Stone Age. Even in the twentieth century, people were ‘rational’ enough to travel to the moon and back and yet still ‘irrational’ enough to believe in supernatural entities and forces that transcend, and in effect make nonsense of, all the laws of physics on which their moon journey depended. Does the human brain construct spaceships and the human mind fashion unseen forces and spirits? What is the difference between brain and mind? What is intelligence and what is human consciousness? How did early people reach a stage of evolution that allowed them to make and understand pictures?”
― James David Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“the essence of being human is an uncomfortable duality of ‘rational’ technology and ‘irrational’ belief.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“[Higher-order consciousness] involves the ability to construct a socially based selfhood, to model the world in terms of the past and the future, and to be directly aware.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Seeing’ two-dimensional images is therefore something that we learn to do; it is not an inevitable part of being human.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic, a great deal happened in a comparatively short time.”
― James David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art