Mind Shift: How Culture Transformed the Human Brain

Summary

The mental capacities of the human mind far outstrip those of other animals. Our imaginations and creativity have produced art, music, and literature; built bridges; probed distant galaxies; and pondered our own existence. What gives the human brain the ability to generate such a rich mental life?

In this book, John Parrington draws on the latest research on the human brain to show how it differs strikingly from those of other animals in its structure and function at molecular and cellular level. He argues that an evolutionary ‘shift’, enlarging the brain, giving it greater flexibility, and enabling higher functions such as imagination, was driven by tool use, but especially by the development of one remarkable tool—language. The complex social interaction brought by language opened up the possibility of shared conceptual worlds, enriched with rhythmic sounds and images that could be drawn on cave walls. This transformation generated an exceptional human consciousness, a sense of self that arises as a product of our brain biology and the social interactions we experience. The individuality of our minds results from this extraordinarily plastic brain, exquisitely shaped and tuned by the social and cultural environment in which we grew up and to which we continue to respond through life. Linking early work by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to the findings of modern neuroscience, Parrington explores how language, culture, and society mediate brain function and what this view of the human mind may bring to our understanding and treatment of mental illness.

Unlike all other animals, the ‘mind shift’ we humans underwent has left us with the extraordinary power of conscious awareness. And words may lie at the heart of that transformation.