Definition: Gizmo
A gizmo is a device or small machine that performs a particular task, usually in a new and efficient way
Birds fly, bees buzz, every species has something that it does well. What is the human speciality, what are its gizmos?
We like to feel special; we like to feel we are apart from other animals. So what will it be? Do we have the biggest brains, the wettest blood? In the animal kingdom, our brains are not exceedingly special.1 We don’t have the biggest brains – that’s elephants and whales. Sure, we have a high proportion of cortex (the outer layer) in our brains, but it’s on a par with chimps, horses, and short-finned whales. We have quite a lot of brain for our body size, but amongst primates, this proportion isn’t strongly linked with thinking ability. Now, we do have a decent number of neurons: over twice as many as gorillas. But even then, not close to the number that dolphins have.2 And to be honest, we probably have the same number of neurons as our ancestors in the wider archaic homo family tree, including Neanderthals – and we like to think we’re specialer than them, don’t we?
Not sure about the wettest blood thing.
There are five human gizmos. Tool use, language, conceptual power, a clutch, and niche building. They are linked.
The first human gizmo is tool use. One of the things we do exceptionally well is to build and use tools, particularly to shape and interact with our physical world. As we saw in the previous section, evolution tends to innovate at the periphery, out in the body. We have dextrous hands and opposable thumbs. We don’t use them for walking. In the same way the bat has no special new part of the brain to support echolocation, we don’t have a special new part of the brain to support tool use. The motor functions are supported by the front part of the brain. We do have more ‘front of the brain’. Our brain develops using a similar recipe to other mammals and primates, but the front bit of the cortex grows for a longer time and becomes larger. The recipe is tweaked. The extra cortex allows us to develop fine motor control and coordinated movements to create and use tools.
The second gizmo is language. In one way, this is similar to tool use. Language is a sequence of complex movements, but now used to shape and interact with our social world. The innovation of evolution is in the articulators – lips, tongue, larynx – and mechanisms of airflow, which together enable us to make the range of speech sounds. In the brain, language also requires the extra cortex to learn the complex and precise motor movements to produce words. But there are no new special parts for language. Language utilises circuits used in making sequences of movements, circuits for perception, concepts, processing situational scripts, social intentions and agents. It fashions these together into a system that allows for fluent use of this motor skill. And if we want, we can use movements of the hands to communicate, in sign language. 3
Language is a great gizmo because it is an enabler. It allows you to acquire knowledge without direct experience. You can learn by being instructed. It supports building abstract concepts, by using a language label (like “six”) to bring together all the different situations involving six-ness (an Arabic numeral, a group of six things, an object with six parts, a sequence of numbers where six falls between 5 and 7, a pile of sweets bigger than 3 but smaller than 20, a length of 6, and so forth). Language can be used to bring to mind knowledge that is not automatically elicited by the current situation, via verbal analogies (e.g., ‘This football match is like David vs. Goliath’; ‘You can view electricity like the flow of water along a pipe’). Beyond the individual, language supports sophisticated socially coordinated activities, greatly increasing the potency of group behaviour.
The third gizmo is more conceptual power. With more cortex, especially in the front of the brain, more complex ideas can be developed. The evolutionary reasons for the larger cortex are murky. Maybe it was to support language, maybe tool use, maybe to support social cognition to deal with life in larger groups (keeping track of who likes whom, who did what to whom, what does everyone want, who’s lying, etc.). Maybe all these things at once. But once you have more power, the game changes.
We talked about sensory and motor systems in terms of towers. The lower floors see patterns, each higher floor sees patterns within a patterns. The larger cortex means humans have higher towers. In sensory systems, they can see deeper patterns of meaning in what they perceive, in motor systems they can plan motor sequences that reach farther into the future.
The deeper patterns of meaning include mental models of how the physical world works. This can include inventing invisible forces to explain physical events (electrons, germs, gods, ghosts). In the social world, it can include more sophisticated knowledge of social scripts, episodes, situations, and motivations. Although our basic emotions are probably similar to other social primates, we can attach these to more complex social scripts (W does X under Y circumstances and feels Z; Sophie snubs Bill at the party and feels guilty). This leads to a wider palette of emotions: pride, hubris, dignity, honour, admiration.4 Our mental simulations can include ideas about ourselves, in so-called meta-cognition, self-awareness, where I form a theory about how I behave, and use this knowledge to alter my future behaviour. More pre-frontal cortex, where the modulatory system lies, also gives the modulatory system more precise control over the meaning systems in the rest of the brain. It can separately control bits of ideas. I’ll have this bit of the idea, but not that bit. It allows for thinking about ‘what-if’ counterfactuals, about hypothetical situations. I mean, what if the moon was made of cheese?
One particular advantage of more precise internal control is that it gives us a clutch.
Definition: clutch – a mechanism for connecting and disconnecting an engine and the transmission system in a vehicle, or the working parts of any machine
The fourth gizmo is a clutch. Part of the modulatory system (sitting in the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex, sigh) is a disengage system. Brain activity can be decoupled from perception and turned to internally focused thought. You hear a sad story, and it makes you _think_… When disengaged from the present moment, the brain can run mental simulations. Fantasy and imagination. It can retrieve memories of past experiences to envision future and alternative perspectives and scenarios, conceive the perspective of others, simulate the navigation of social interactions, ruminate, generate and manipulate mental images, decide on moral dilemmas. All the things we do when we sit and think rather than perceive and respond to our immediate environments. The brain can even disengage while it carries out automatic activities. You daydream while you do the washing up. When the clutch is pressed down, we have the opportunity to learn not from the world but from our imaginations.
The final gizmo builds on all the other four: tool use, the social coordination enabled by language, the planning and imagining of other worlds enabled by greater conceptual power. It is a gizmo that most marks us out from other similar species: niche construction. A niche is the particular environment that a species lives in, and to which it is adapted. Unusually, you can find humans almost anywhere. Jungles, swamps, savannahs, mountains, deserts, tropics, icy wastes. Birmingham. Humans use their gizmos to adapt to all these environments, to build their own niches. Clothes, dwellings, modes of transport, hunting and farming equipment. We change our environments to fit our biology.5
So there you have it. Human do have some gizmos, without being biologically particularly special.
Unfortunately … these gizmos aren’t enough to explain how the modern human brain works. And that’s because you can’t explain how the modern human brain works just by looking inside it.