Product Description

Drawing on his theory of the origins of the modern mind, Merlin Donald's thesis presents the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. Donald proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a supercomplex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind, Donald suggests, is our main evolutionary advantage, for it allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85303 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
MERLIN DONALD is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Ontario, Canada.

Customer Reviews

A mind so limitless
What is human conscience? How did it develop? What is language? In what part of evolution did language first exist? These are questions that Merlin Donald deals with in his book A mind so Rare.
The first chapters are devoted to a criticism of the Hardliners, people like Steven Pinker, Jackendoff, Noam Chomsky and others who think that language can be explained as a solely innate process. Merlin Donald gives lots of examples - among them Helen Keller - of how this might not be true. Language must be consciously aquired, and this can be done in many ways. Thus he argues that conscience is a prerequisite of language.
His book is the first one I have read where the vast, seemingly fathomless possibilities of the human mind are explored. Contrary to Steven Pinker, who wants to narrow down language to a common brain-base for all of mankind, Donald shows that our possibilities of symbolic expression are virtually without limits.
His conclusion is that language has been aquired from the outside and in, that it's not an innate process but a cultural one. It developed from acting, body-language, sounds and other primitive means of communication within hunting and food-gathering groups, he claims.
But is this an explanation? Body language is also a form of language, pointing has to be learned consciously as Wittgenstein has shown (to point might mean: look in the other direction, or anything at all). It seems that Donald is saying that language is a prerequisite of language. He has to explain how language taken in a wider context including body language could arise in the first place. He has to show how you can be conscious (if consciousness precedes language) without knowing that you are conscious, that is without having some sort of language.
My guess is that both Hardliners and those speaking in behalf of deep enculturation like Donald are wrong and that language (some sort of symbols) and conscience arose simultaneously. When you study language you are already enveloped in language and can never go back to the beginning, something that strongly advocates my view. You are in chains when you try to find out what chains are, which makes it impossible to do so.
Donald's book is nevertheless very interesting. His attempts to smother Hardliners are very convincing and therefore worth every bit of praise that they can get.