Brain Stages

Abstract

Evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald has theorized certain stages in the human development of Self and Other awareness, which I would relate to the theatre of ghosts and gods, emerging within and between our ancestors’ brains.¹ Donald uses archeological research to argue that around two million years ago—when the species Homo erectus evolved with bigger brains, improved tool use, and more meat eating than the prior Australopithecines—hominids became “highly social and evidently used a cultural strategy for remembering and problem solving” (Mind 261).² Donald calls the prior stage of primate brain evolution “episodic,” involving a basic self-awareness and event sensitivity (260). All mammals bind their perceptions and short-term memories into sequences of “discrete episodes” (201). They integrate experiences and internal body feelings, organizing them into “large-scale scenes” of memory—as in Dennett’s theory of an internal environment (discussed in chapter 1 here). Some nonhuman primates can also recognize themselves in a mirror or photograph (Donald, Mind 120–22).³ But they lack a self-referential awareness of inner states, even when taught by humans to use language. But they lack a self-referential awareness of inner states, even when taught by humans to use language. According to Donald, they are “immersed in a stream of raw episodic experience, from which they cannot gain any distance” (120)—as with Edelman’s notion of a “remembered present” in animal consciousness (considered in chapter 7).³