A debauched & scatological read that has obviated much of my other thinking!

Yip, the three silly words in the title are the ones that I had to look up when reading the paper I'm about to discuss - but seeing as I went to the effort of searching for them in an online dictionary, I thought I'd better use them. ( I had a clue about the meaning of debauched, but I had to be sure... you see, I may have taken part in various forms of debauchery in the past.)

And it is the past that I want to discuss now - or rather- how the past 'influences' the present, to be more specific. In my undergraduate degree I discovered C.G. Jung, and I was so influenced by his writing that I shaped my dissertation around his theories of the active imagination, then he influenced my creative writing in the form of Vogler and Campbell (....have I just given away the structure of all my stories!!) and it began to become clear to me why I liked the things I like. ( I did consider jumping in a bath and shouting Eureka!)

However when I accepted this funded PhD in the broad area of 'Media Effects', for one reason or another, I thought that my interest in the collective unconscious/behaviour related to the past would have to be shelved for 3 or so years. It was not the case however, and in my very first meeting with the 'supreme and glorious chief director of studies for the known universe and its parallels' - may he live forever, my attention was directed towards evolutionary psychology as a possible answer to my quandary.

So having finished re-acquainting myself with the general concerns of the Media Effects debate, I have now turned my full attention to evolutionary psychology. I have decided to begin as a blank canvas ( as best I can having been influenced by Jung) and started my reading with a primer by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - what follows is a summary of the subject, as derived from the paper.

The question I always have in the back of my mind is - why do backyard wrestlers do what they do?

So, evolutionary psychology (EP) is an approach that can be applied to many of psychology's topics as opposed to a direct area of study. EP is concerned with how the mind is designed to deal with adaptive problems - problems that crop up consistently during the evolutionary process, and problems concerning reproduction. We can think of our instincts as specialized neural circuits common to all members of the species that are the product of our evolutionary history, and when all these circuits are combined they create 'human nature'. Nonetheless, there seems to be the tendency to think that the modern day human is no longer driven by instinct, but rather by reason - however William James suggests that we are simply suffering from 'instinct blindness' due to the effectiveness of our instincts in making us flexibly intelligent - to start to understand our instincts we must make the natural strange, and through this expose the 'computational machinery' of the mind that regulates our activities.

Contrasting views to EP see the human mind as a blank slate that is completed through experience as we progress through life, this empiricist view suggests that all content of the human mind is derived form the environmental and social world, and the mechanisms behind the content are domain general/content independent - they have no pre-existing content in their procedures. As such the standard social science model suggests that the mind's contents are free social constructions, disconnected from evolution. If this is so why then does it appear that most humans seem to share assumptions about the world and humanity even if their environment/social system is very different?

The five principles EP uses to understand the design of the human mind

1. The brain is a physical system - thoughts are produced by chemical reactions - neurons transmit information caused by these reactions to our bodies. Motor neurons cause our muscles to move, and as such this movement can be interpreted as behaviour - and the motion generated by the circuits of neurons is appropriate to our environmental circumstances.

2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection. Our neural circuits were designed to solve adaptive problems, and the circuits we have today are the circuits that best solved the adaptive problems of our ancestors during our evolutionary journey (humans with ineffective circuits died out) We do solve problems hunter gatherers did not have to solve, but our ability to solve new problems can be seen as side effects, or by products of solving ancient adaptive problems - we can skateboard or surf because we can walk and balance.

3. Most of our mind is hidden from us. we are not aware of most of our Brain's activities - we experience the self and this makes us think that our mental circuitry is much simpler than it actually is. Our neural circuitry is vastly complex and unconscious so that it can work effectively.

4. Different circuits solve different problems. Like the organs of our bodies our neural circuits are functionally specialised to do particular jobs, this is to ensure that they solve each particular adaptive problem effectively - as such they are guided by qualitatively different standards - we can call these specialised circuits 'modules' and can see the brain as a collection of modules that are functionally integrated to produce behaviour. Biological machines are linked to their environment, but EP suggests that babies are born with privileged hypotheses about how to interact with their environment that are domain specific, allowing for faster solving of adaptive problems, because the mind is already aware of the problem domain.

5. modern skull, stone age mind. Even simple evolutionary changes take tens of thousands of years, for 99% of our history we lived as hunter gatherers - our neural circuits are the ones evolved by the hunter gatherers - we have not had time yet to develop new ones for the post industrial society. In understanding behaviour it is key to remember that our neural circuitry was not designed to solve our present day problems. So to understand our behaviour we must understand the modules that control it, and accept that those modules may not effectively solve today's problems.

So a point to ponder.....are we always behind the curve, with our mental circuits struggling to deal with contemporary adaptive problems, or are we unfortunate to exist in a time of intense change that will eventually give way to a prolonged period of stability like that of our hunter gatherer ancestors? Hmmmm.

More reading required I think.

Oh and I'll get to berger and Smackdown later tonight.

References

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1997) Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,[online] Availble: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (accessed:08/10/07)