| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £7.30
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £7.30, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Origins of the Modern Mind is an admirable book...Its author displays throughout an engaging enthusiasm, a fertile imagination and an impressive knowledge of his subject-matter. -- Christopher Longuet-Higgins Times Literary Supplement A fine, provocative and absorbing account of what makes humans human. Kirkus Reviews Nowadays one hears...that hand-held calculators destroy young people's motivation to learn arithmetic. But not to worry, says Merlin Donald, author of this revelatory but demanding history of human consciousness. He welcomes the computer, as well as other forms of electronic storage and manipulation of data and images, including TV, as the highest stage of mental development--and perhaps the final one. -- John Wilkes Los Angeles Times
Product Description
This bold book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful
A really swell read....
23 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback
This is a fun book to read-- which is something for a book that credibly spreads across a number of disciplines and through some pretty dense stuff....
Donald is a credible writer and has a style that is simultaneously engaging without losing academic credibility. After opening up with a couple of chapters dealing with a review of literature stemming from before Darwin, he moves into an examination of archaeology, anthropology, and neurology trying to trace how the human mind came to function as it does (if you see it as special... or not....)
He traces through most of history. It is a broad, well-constucted swoop but one of which I still have not passed my final judgement. Perhaps it will take a couple of reads before I get to that point. What I am certain of is that this book, secondary to Julian Jaynes "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" made me THINK more about how we think than any other book I have come across.
I wholeheartedly recommend for you to buy this book if you have stumbled across this page....
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
How Did We Get To Be So Smart?
17 Dec 1999
Format:Paperback
The shelves are crowded now with books on the origins of intelligence. Donald's 1991 book is still an excellent introduction. He begins with a fun though intense review of 19th and 20th century brain studies, exposing the workings of the human mind. Then he reaches back to our beginnings, examining chimpanzee intelligence for clues. After a look at various chimp talents, in socializing, politics, tool-making, and very limited vocalizing, he wonders how we humans got from there to here. Language has been central to human intelligence for many thousands of years. Donald speculates about a pre-language stage of physical mimicry and hand gestures. Even now we gesticulate and grimace to enhance our verbal communication. Upon the three-stage pattern of development, from grunts to gestures to language, humans then added literacy. This changed our modes of thought significantly, teaching us to address our ideas to a wide absent audience, ordering the ideas logically, and thereby moving us towards a more objective and systematic way of thinking. Since Guttenberg literacy has given us external storage systems of knowledge, which once again shifted culture, as we not only amassed information but struggled with the task of inventing rational storage and retrieval systems. Donald's work is full of fascinating pieces of information, connected in a provocative framework. This book is wonderful in its own right; it also provides excellent background for grasping the significance of later work, by Gellner or Diamond or Pinker, on the evolution of human culture and the origin and power of language in human life.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Earnest, Learned and Valiant Effort
18 May 2000
Format:Paperback
Although I didn't finish this book altogether convinced (nor altogether unconvinced) of his schema for human cognitive evolution, I was nonetheless very pleased and very grateful for Merlin Donald's clear and thorough review of the facts. Donald carefully sorts through the wealth of anthropological, paleontological, physiological, linguistic, and, most intriguingly, cognitive-psychological data, to separate the real clues from the red herrings. He expertly demonstrates the complexity and nuances of the evidence, while at the same time building his outline of a theory of the emergence of human consciousness. While I found this theory somewhat hazy and incomplete, particularly with respect to the "mimetic" stage he posits for H. erectus, it is quite acceptable in the spirit in which it is given: a tentative suggestion of what a plausible origins scenario must look like. From this perspective, his thoughts are most valuable, and by necessity provoke the reader to ruminate on the bewildering array of issues the author navigates so expertly. Merlin Donald does not adopt the strident, advocative tone that so many big-picture human evolution theorists do--rather, he lets the steady buildup of evidence and counter-evidence show you how he arrived at his ideas. The book is a dated, but still glittering, treasure of references and findings in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and animal and human cognition--I have used it quite a few times simply to remind myself--and others--of the strange but true, and of how things don't always conform to the wished-for pattern. For instance, Donald's wonderful and almost touching account of "Brother John", a paroxysmal aphasic, is a perfect rejoinder to anyone who equates "language" with "intelligence".
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Art, Architecture & Photography
- Books > Computing & Internet > Computer Science
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Medical & Healthcare Practitioners > Internal Medicine > Neurology & Clinical Neurophysiology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Medical & Healthcare Practitioners > Other Branches of Medicine
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Cognition & Cognitive Psychology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Schools of Thought > Evolutionary Psychology
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Specific Topics > Artificial Intelligence
- Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Evolution
- Books > Science & Nature > Biological Sciences > Human Biology > Neuroscience
- Books > Science & Nature > Medicine
- Books > Scientific, Technical & Medical
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Social & Cultural
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
