Are we humans simply remodelled apes? Chimps with a tweak? Is the difference between our genomes so minuscule it justifies the argument that our cognition and behaviour must also differ from chimps by barely a whisker? If “chimps are us” should we grant them human rights? Or is this one of the biggest fallacies in the study of evolution? NOT A CHIMP argues that these similarities have been grossly over-exaggerated - we should keep chimps at arm’s length. Are humans cognitively unique after all?
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Language Is The Key To Theory Of Mind
In Chapter 10 of NOT A CHIMP I present a short account of the work of Rebecca Saxe on theory of mind - social intelligence. Saxe has shown on several occasions that the representation of higher order ToM - things like beliefs and desires - can only be facilitated by language. This would mean that it was always beyond chimps and any other animal species. This NS article recounts her recent work presenting congenitally blind adults - they have been blind all their lives - with audible questions to test whether they could understand the concept of a false belief in the head of another. The same "social brain" regions lit up as those in sighted people on equivalent tests. This suggests that we don't depend on interpreting facial expressions or gestures to judge the mental states of others. Saxe's observations are backed up by further work on profoundly deaf Nicaraguan people by Jennie Pyers who not only showed that adolescent deaf signers, with a more complicated signing grammar than first generation signers, were more advanced on tests of theory of mind, but that the older generation caught up on theory of mind the better their signing became with practice.
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