Session 20: Episode 5(5) —

Mnemonics and the rise of social complexity

William P. Hall President Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org william-hall@bigpond.com http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net

Access my research papers from Google Citations

Tonight

In the last session I considered the evolutionary circumstances that enabled our hunting and gathering ancestors to become recognizably human in their control of fire and the use of symbolic language

– However, for something like 250,000 years our ancestors and cousins seemed to be limited in the complexity of the technology they could use

– Suggests some cognitive capacity limit had been reached in the amount of knowledge that could be accumulated and transmitted.

Something began to happen around 50,000 years ago that breached the limitations to facilitate developing much more sophisticated hunting technologies, and then completely new technologies underlying the Agricultural Revolution

– Lynne Kelly’s insights explain how this was achieved without writing

When human organizations began to dominate the world • Mnemonics started modern humans on the road to planetary dominance • Becoming settled – surmounting the knowledge limitations of migratory life • Agricultural Revolution - humans control animal and plant metabolism

From archeology to history

Question:

How did humans accumulate enough knowledge to make the transition from ~2

million years of hunting and gathering to living in towns and farming in only 2-3

thousand years?

Phenomenal changes in the rates in the cultural accumulation of technical & natural history knowledge

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~ 5 ma our common ancestors with chimps knew enough to use simple stone tools

~2.5 ma early Homo knew enough to be top carnivore on the savanna

~ 400 ka our ancestors began developing more complex. sophisticated tool kits (acquisition of speech?)

~300 to ~60 ka showed technological quasi stability with gains & losses possibly showing that cognition may have reached some kind of capacity limit (e.g., memory)

< 60 ka notable increase in development of complex tech ~60 ka hunter-gatherers invaded

Eurasia as top carnivores ~12 ka beginning Neolithic

(Agricultural) Revolution ~9.5 ka complex urban townships,

e.g., Çatalhöyük

First introductions of new technologies McBrearty & Brooks 2000

Development of increasingly complex stone tools (after Stout 2011), correlates with increasing brain capacity and development of language.

Even with language, knowledge is limited by what can be learned, remembered, and passed on by single individuals.

By < 500 kya, pace of change in the capacity to deal with multiple complexities is too fast to be explained genetically

< 50 kya increasing rate of change suggests major cultural innovation to support accumulation of much larger volumes of knowledge.

mnemonics: use of specific mental aids to again increase the capacity, accuracy and duration of living memory to store knowledge – Storage

– Indexing

– Recall – Transmission

What enabled increasing tool complexity?

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Acheulian

Oldowan Introduction & exponential growth of new technologies

Estimating the extent of the new knowledge

required to support the Agricultural Revolution in

the Neolithic

From hunting and gathering (12,000 kya) to Çatalhöyük (9,500 ka) in ~3,000 years

Mesolithic in the Levant: ~22,000 - ~11,500 kya Neolithic in the Levant: ~10,000 -

Some technologies developed at Çatalhöyük

Cultivation of crops and living in towns required a universe of new and increasingly complex technologies

In transition this new knowledge has to be added on top of the old knowledge

– See lime plaster below

7 Pegler 2012

Hodder 2012

An aspect of the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic (Ian Hodder, head Çatalhöyük Research Project)

For at least seventy thousand years, anatomically modern humans, people biologically like us in every way, lived in small mobile groups of ten to thirty people, aggregating from time to time, and sometimes producing wonderful wall paintings and magnificent implements. Their success and mobility were partly possible because they carried very little stuff with them. The small bands had clothes made of skin tied together with sinews and plant chords. They had baskets and skin containers and through time they added bone tools such as needles. They had wooden spears and bows, as well as tools and weapons made of chipped stone such as flint and obsidian. They lived in cave entrances or in huts made of various plants or bones from wild animals. You could place on a small table all the material belongings of a man or woman twenty thousand years ago. They had very little stuff.

But then, relatively suddenly, about ten thousand years ago in the Middle East, the amount of stuff in peoples’ lives increased dramatically. By stuff I mean material things made by humans…

The amount of new stuff that became part of the lives of people is quite striking…

And the stuff was no longer so easy to replace. The more material people accumulated, the more they had to look after it and manage it. People were becoming increasingly entangled in things. Especially problematic were the walls of houses. The sun-dried mudbrick absorbed rainwater very easily, swelled, and then contracted. The walls had a tendency to crack, buckle, bend, and collapse. People had to find solutions to keep them up and stable; for example, they constructed wooden frames within houses or built buttresses against walls or used sandier bricks. So people got increasingly caught up in things and in the care and management of things. One thing just seemed to lead to another, as new solutions were found which themselves depended on getting more things……

8 Ian Hodder (2014). The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View New Literary History 45, 19–36

Primary oral cultures

Oral vs literate cultures (download Walter Ong 1982 book) – Primary oral cultures have had no contact with written language and

thus no means to record knowledge explicitly Except for manufactured tools and modifications to the environment,

primary oral cultures have no world 3 in Popper’s sense

Such cultures live entirely within world 2

– No choice but to preserve culturally accumulated knowledge and living memory

– Only way to transmit such knowledge is via speech and demonstration

A few primary cultures still exist that have had only recent or very limited contacts with literate cultures

– Caveat: anthropologists with European backgrounds have considerable conceptual difficulties understanding their stories unless they understand the stories’ multi-layered mnemonic functions

– It is clear that many oral cultures do use a number of mnemonic techniques to make their stories memorable and transmissible 9

Lynne Kelly’s thesis

(heavily paraphrased) ―

Ancient monuments such as Stonehenge are mnemonic devices forming part of formal knowledge management systems

that helped prehistoric cultures accumulate and transmit the great

increases in new knowledge required to make the transition from hunting and gathering to specialized trades and

roles in settled agricultural communities and city-states

1. Paleoarcheological evidence for mnemonics?

Exogram (Bednarik 2014 & earlier) – External memory trace

– Sought to explain very early rock art as externalisations of cognitive reference frames expressed in sensuously perceptible materials, as projections of neural structures perceptible projections of neural systems.

– Argued for a significant communication potential of such engramlike phenomena, because other hominins would have possessed ‘resonating’ cerebral systems capable of response.

– Memory,became increasingly encoded in external object traces.

– The exponential increase in cultural complexity became possible by the burgeoning reliance of the brain on exograms — even as brain volume declined. 12 Bednarik 2013, etc.

2. Paleoarcheological evidence for mnemonics?

Engravings on a tibia fragment of the forest elephant from the major Lower Paleolithic occupation site of Bilzingsleben (~370 kya), one of several engraved pieces from the living floor there. At least two of four engraved bone objects derive from the long-extinct forest elephant. The four bone fragments feature a variety of deliberate arrangements, as demonstrated by laser microscopic study of linear grooves made with stone tools (Bednarik 2014) 13

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3. Paleoarcheological evidence for mnemonics?

The oldest securely dated, purposely made engravings (two ochre slabs engraved with geometric patterns) come from Blombos Cave ~75 kya. Both are variants of the same pattern suggesting they are not accidental.

Note that Bednarik in numerous publications argues that academic archeologists have missed a lot of older indications because they were not looking for it (Bednarik 2014). See Bednarik on beads possibly as old as 300 kya 2015

A. B. C.

A. Thin ochre slab engraved with a set of joining lines from the Middle Stone Age layers of Blombos cave dated to 100,000 years ago. Right: close-up view of the engraved pattern. Scale bars = 1 cm. B. Engraved ochre slab, C. shell beads, B & C both from Still Bay layers of Blombos Cave, S.A. ~75 kya (d’Errico et al. 2009)

Portable/personal mnemonics? for Early & Middle Epipaleolithic cultures in Levant – convergent or generic?

Artifacts – a-b) polished bone beads from Uyun al-Hammam – c) worked stone pebble from Urkan e-Rubb (Hovers 1990)

>14,500 years ago

– d) incised stone plaquette from Kharaneh IV (Maher et al. 2012) Site dated to between 23,000 and 16,500 years ago (Maher et al. 2015)

– e) pierced marine shell from Kharaneh IV (ditto) – f) incised bone pendant from Kharaneh IV (ditto) – g) incised bone fragments from Kharaneh IV (ditto)

These may help individuals store more knowledge – but what about cultures? 15

First settlements and animal domestication

Settlements and monumental architectures predate agriculture

17 Robinson 2013

Animal domestication and plant domestication

Signal for detecting domestication is changed sex ratio of the harvested animals – especially in the harvesting of young males (years before present)

18 Zeder 2008 Colors denote species

Becoming settled – surmounting the limitations of nomadic life

Mobile populations are limited to technology they can carry with them or fabricate on demand

Accumulating knowledge for more, and more effective technologies enables more effective harvesting of resources over smaller geographic areas – Increased population size adds capacity for further accumulation of specialized cultural knowledge

Becomes practical to establish core living areas – Permanent shelters (i.e., houses)

– Accumulation of tools and construction of specialized processing areas

– Specialized structures for the long-term, safe storage of food, other resources and cultural activity

Reduced contact with the broad landscape combined with need to manage more and more specialized technology related knowledge – Paths in the landscape no longer provide useful indexes for those trades & guilds that don’t traverse them

– Need to make new mnemonic paths in compactly constructed landscapes

Solution: Kelly (2012). When Knowledge was Power: Build compact monumental landscapes that can be traversed sequentially (e.g., Göbekli Tepe, Stonehenge, Poverty Point, Chaco Canyon Kivas, etc.)

– Göbekli Tepe (not fully excavated) dated ~ 11 kya southern Turkey 3 ka before the agricultural revolution No habitations in immediate vicinity

Several circular structures containing iconic monuments

Suggestion: each specialization had its own guild-hall for the rehearsal and transmission of its secret and arcane knowledge

Sequence of memorable markers used as mnemonic index loci organized to be traversed in ritual procession & dance

May be a number of levels of recognized expertise where initiates must demonstrate accuracy and and completeness of their memory

– Other sites from primary oral cultures have similar features

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Pre-agricultural monumental architectures in the Levant associated with “settlement

20 Benz & Bauer 2014: p. 11

8 = Gobekli Tepe

10 = Karahan Tepe

7 = Hamzan Tepe

9 = Tasli Tepe

6 = Navalı Çori

11 = Sefer tepe

Social indexing, rehearsing and transmission of large bodies of knowledge

The importance of common indexes for sharing knowledge – Portability is useful for mobile populations (e.g., the smartphone!) – One person’s mnemonic tool is useless to another unless they have shared the rehearsal,

and even then only one person can use it.

A group of people sequentially traversing a landscape with many loci can share their rehearsals of knowledge indexed against each locus

– Specific recitals, songs & dances & other mnemonic rituals associated with each locus – Peer review and criticism can be applied to ensure that each person’s memory coincides

with other people’s memory – Memorized recitals also tested against the real world – those that don’t match will not

be rehearsed any more and forgotten. – Thus, the group shares one index and the knowledge accessed via each indexing locus – Body marks, secret signs, etc. can be used to indicate that an initiate has achieved

perfection in their rehearsals

A common solution to becoming sedentary may be to build artificial landscapes – Participation in the act of building an indexing locus while rehearsing the knowledge

associated with it will powerfully enhance the memory being rehearsed – Need restricted rehearsal spaces: secret mens’ business, secret womens’ business,

secret guilds, levels of initiation, etc. all contribute to preservation of specific bodies of knowledge.

This was all a lot of work, so it is understandable why people used this technology only when they had no other way

Formal process – think school, college, university degrees, scientific publications

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Do these wall paintings from Çatalhöyük have mnemonic functions?

Çatalhöyük is one of the first fully agrarian cities

– Inhabited from ~9,600 years ago until ~7,800

– Population ~5-7 K, 10 K max

Mostly abstract mnemonic(?) wall paintings common

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Check out Flikr pictures of the site

Mnemonics, settlement, the agricultural revolution and increasing cultural complexity

With settlement, nomadic groups become territorial and build villages Positive feedback drives ever-increasing growth rate of cultural knowledge accumulation for

ever-increasing ecological hegemony over environmental resources – Culturally accumulating knowledge enables more efficient/effective control & of local resources

– Surplus resources enables population growth providing more capacity for cultural memory

– Development of ever more sophisticated mnemonic devices

– Greater population allows more specialization of crafts, trades and guilds able to accumulate still more varied and detailed knowledge of the world’

Cf Masonic ritual, craft guilds Tracking demographic and cultural transitions in the Near East from small nomadic groups

of hunter-gathers, through settled groups of local foragers, to the formation of agricultural towns:

– Bar-Yosef, O. 2011. Climatic fluctuations and early farming in West and East Asia. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S175-S193 - http://tinyurl.com/lv5rhgn.

– Goring-Morris, A.N., Belfer-Cohen, A. 2011. Neolithization process in the Levant: the outer envelope. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S195-S208 - http://tinyurl.com/kjgyu5d.

– Belfer-Cohen, A., Goring-Morris, A.N. 2011. Becoming farmers: the inside story. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S209-S220 - http://tinyurl.com/lrttpv6

– Zeder, M.A. 2011. The origins of agriculture in the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S221-S235 - http://tinyurl.com/mr8grhj

– Vigne, J.-D., Carrère, I., Briois, F., Guilaine, J. 2011. The early process of mammal domestication in the Near East: new evidence from the Pre-Neolithic and Pre-Pottery Neolithic in Cyprus. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S255-S271 - http://tinyurl.com/kr4yvyo

– Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. 2011. The agricultural demographic transition during and after the agriculture inventions. Current Anthropology 52(S4), S497-S510 - http://tinyurl.com/kh2yhns 23

Neurological context for the Method of Loci –

how does it work

— The hippocampus, grid cells, place

cells, and episodic memory

(Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014)

HIPPOCAMPUS

Wikipedia: from Anatomography website maintained by Life Science Databases(LSDB)

Environmental mapping essential for all self-mobile animals

Basic knowledge requirement for survival – Model/map of the essential environment

Landmarks & coordinates

Know where shelter is

Know where resources can be found

Know where dangers lurk

– Know where I am relative to the above

Neurosensory capabilities – Sensory capabilities to determine spatial relations to landmarks

– Processing capabilities Recognize landmarks & relate these to map

Determine self’s location on map relative to shelter and needs

Access and evaluate memories relating to self’s location on map

Entering location often sufficient to trigger strong memories associated with that location

Hippocampal region known to provide the indexing system for this kind of knowledge in mammals and birds 25

Functional organization of long-term memory

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Long-term memory

Declarative (explicit) Procedural (implicit)

Episodic Semantic

Spatial

Know how Body memory

What happened when? Temporal indexing

Abstracted facts, meanings, concepts, models of external world i.e., our “scientific” knowledge of how the world works Classification indexing

Spatial monitoring & feedback Navigating mapping spatial indexing Cognitive map of the experienced environment What are the landmarks? Where I am on the map? What happened here? What happened there? Where is home? What else do I know about here and there?

Short-term memory Recording, monitoring ongoing interactions in the world

Performance monitoring & feedback

After Mastin 2010 - The Human Memory

The hippocampus indexes memory in relationship to time and space

Spatial memory cognitive map (CM) – CMs construct, accumulate and organize knowledge along spatial coordinates

– Uses visualization to enhance recall and learning of information

Neural correlates – Spatial & episodic memory affected by lesions to the hippocampus

– Identification and location of special cell types playing central roles in indexing system (2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) John O’Keefe – identified ‘place’ and ‘boundary’ cells in hippocampus

Edvard and May-Brit Moser – identified grid cells in entorhinal cortex adjacent to hippocampus

Also ‘time’ cells to track & record temporal sequence and place in time

– Connects to visual processing Has all the features to be the master system for relationally indexing all

long-term knowledge.

Explains how Method of Loci can help users consciously enhance and organize for easy retrieval items of knowledge deemed to be important

– Remember the story to identify a path with memorable loci

– Index other memories to memorable places a long the path 27

Geospatial mapping in the hippocampal formation

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Allen & Fortin 2013

Pilly & Gossberg 2013

Eichenbaum 2014

Next session

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Tonight, based on Lynne Kelly’s revolutionary insight, I discussed how something began to happen around 50,000 years ago that breached the limitations to facilitate developing much more sophisticated hunting technologies, and then completely new technologies underlying the Agricultural Revolution.

In the next session I will conclude Episode 5 by explaining how the succession of exponentially more powerful information technologies fuelled a sequence of cognitive revolutions leading inevitably to the emergence of today’s humano-technical cyborgs and knowledge-based socio-technical organizations that exist as autopoietic entities in their own right.

Emergence of the socio-technical organization

• Revolutionary cognitive technologies lead to grade shifts in organizational cognition and

niche expansion (i.e., Moore’s Law and the ever growing global footprint)

• Tribal and cultural accumulation of knowledge

• Autocracy and the scribal states

• Printing and the industrial organization

• Information processing and the controlled state

• Knowledge processing in today’s state-of-the-art organizations

Bibliography

Eichenbaum, H. 2014. Time cells in the hippocampus: a new dimension for mapping memories. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience 15(11), 732-744 - http://tinyurl.com/qhj49jb

Grossberg, S., Pilly, P.K. 2015. Coordinated learning of grid cell and place cell spatial and temporal properties: multiple scales, attention and oscillations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369: 20120524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0524 - http://tinyurl.com/o2wjwq2

Strange, B.A., et al. 2014. Functional organization of the hippocampal longitudinal axis. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience 15, 655-669 -http://tinyurl.com/q528tv4

Allen, T.A., Fortin, 2013. The evolution of episodic memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 110 (S2), 10379-1038 - http://tinyurl.com/qjpzcw5

Geva-Sagiv, M., et al. 2015. Spatial cognition in bats and rats: from sensory acquisition to multiscale maps and navigation. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience 16(2), 94-108 - http://tinyurl.com/o746b4h

Moser, E.I., et al. 2014. Grid cells and cortical representation. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience 15(7), 466-481 - http://tinyurl.com/nr8ylg9

Moser, E.I., et al. 2008. Place cells, grid cells, and the brain’s spatial representation system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 31:69-89 - http://tinyurl.com/opmot67

Chen, G., et al. 2013. How vision and movementcombine in the hippocampal place code. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 110(1), 378-383 - http://tinyurl.com/pt7zkcq

Tsien, J.Z., et al. 2015. On initial Brain Activity Mapping of episodic and semantic memory code in the hippocampus. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 105, 200–210 - http://tinyurl.com/ps3n8b7

Maden, C.R. 2014. Augmented memory: a survey of the approaches to remembering more. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 8, no. 30, 5 pp. - http://tinyurl.com/ntywnvu

Knierim, J.J. 2012. The rhythm method of memory. Trends in Neurosciences 35(7), 393-394 - http://tinyurl.com/pyb5cwj

Peters, R.G.M. et al.. 2015. Spatial memory and hippocampal enhancement. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 4. 81-91 - http://tinyurl.com/qys4oyl

Lansink, C.S., Pennartz, C.M.A. 2015. Associative reactivation of place–reward information in the hippocampal–ventral striatal circuitry. (In) M. Tatsuno (ed.), Analysis and Modeling of Coordinated Multi-neuronal Activity, Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience 12, 81-104 - http://tinyurl.com/q86hgxx

Spreng, R.N., et al. 2008. The common neural basis of autobiographical memory, prospection, navigation, theory of mind, and the default mode: a quantitative meta-analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21(3), 489–510 - http://tinyurl.com/nn8jzjr

Schultheiss, N.W., et al. 2015. Models and theoretical frameworks for hippocampal and entorhinal cortex function in memory and navigation. (in) M. Tatsuno (ed.), Analysis and Modeling of Coordinated Multi-neuronal Activity, Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience 12, 247-268 - http://tinyurl.com/nhpt92x

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Bibliography (continued)

Nielson, D.M., et al. 2015. Human hippocampus represents space and time during retrieval of real-world memories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 112(35), 11078–11083 - http://tinyurl.com/odf5pxn

Hsieh, L.-T. Ranganath, C. 2015. Cortical and subcortical contributions to sequence retrieval: Schematic coding of temporal context in the neocortical recollection network. NeuroImage 121, 78-90 - http://tinyurl.com/nkwkbdz

Knierim, J.J. 2015. From the GPS to HM: place cells, grid cells, and memory. Hippocampus 25, 719-725 - http://tinyurl.com/nwbeddv

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine : web site - http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2014/

O’Keefe, J. 2014. Spatial cells in the hippocampal formation. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Lecture 07/12/14 - http://tinyurl.com/pow3gmf

Moser, M.-B. 2014. Grid cells, place cells, and memory. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Lecture 07/12/14 - http://tinyurl.com/o8yzhqb

Moser, E.I. 2014. Grid cells and the entorhinal map of space. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Lecture 07/12/14 - http://tinyurl.com/p6toodg

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