Written by Kate Jensen
Living in a highly literary modern society, the ability to transcribe our thoughts, feelings, and ideas into written words is something that many of us take for granted. However, looking back at the formation of early writing systems can provide clarity into the way that literacy impacted the way the brain works, and provide a historical precedent for the way that technology continues to shape the mind.
A Brief History of Ancient Writing Systems
In his play Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus recounts the myth of the Titan Prometheus. Prometheus was condemned to eternal torment as a punishment for stealing fire from the Olympian gods. Prometheus gave this fire to humanity along with other gifts that helped to jumpstart civilization. Among these gifts was the ability to write.
The earliest evidence of writing comes from the Sumer region of Mesopotamia, around 3400 BC. The development of the Sumerian script, known as Cuneiform, is thought to be tied to physical materials that were well-suited to writing: clay for tablets and reeds for writing implements. As the tools used to write became more advanced, so too did writing systems develop. When wedge-shaped styluses were introduced, writing in clay became easier and quicker. This allowed Cuneiform to advance, ultimately using about 1000 signs to represent objects, words, syllables, and sounds. For example, Linear A—a currently undeciphered script from Minoan Crete—developed from Cuneiform, using styluses to cut lines into clay rather than wedges. This linear quality was adapted by the slightly later Mycenaeans in their Linear B script, which developed around 1400 BC for the purpose of administrative record keeping. The Archaic Period, from around 1200 BC to 700 BC, brought on a period that many scholars refer to as the “Dark Ages” in Greece. Use of Linear B had ceased, but no other writing system seems to have replaced it in the region. Alphabetic writing, adopted from the Phoenicians, reintroduced literacy to Greece around the eighth century BC, forming the basis for many modern languages.
Can Archaeology Teach Us About the Brain?
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new approach to archaeology developed, known as processual archaeology. Processualists approach archaeology with more of a scientific than cultural lens; they argue that archaeological finds demonstrate physical environments, and the impact of survival needs on human behavior more so than the thoughts and ideas that caused human behavior.
This new approach had many opponents; among them were the developers of cognitive archaeology. Cognitive Archaeology arises from the assertion that archaeological finds have implications beyond physical environment and survival, allowing us to understand the minds of people in the past through the study of their culture and what they have left behind.
Adrial Currie and Anton Killin, two philosophers who study topics in archaeology, argue that cognitive archaeology is “the practice of inferring from things to thinking, linking material remains to cognitive features of past humans and their societies via midrange theories.” By “midrange theories,” they mean theories about the way that material culture interacts with cognitive psychology. Among these midrange theories is the idea of active externalism, which I argue holds special significance for understanding the way that minds work both historically and today.
Active externalism is a psychological hypothesis that suggests cognitive processes and mental states can extend beyond the mind to the physical environment. A good example of this process is given by David Clark and Andy Chalmers in their article “The Extended Mind.” In the article, they tell a story about two people, Otto and Inga, meeting at a museum. Inga remembers where the museum is and uses her spatial memory to get there. Otto has dementia, so he does not remember how to get to the museum but has written directions on a notepad. By using his notepad, Otto has completely externalized the cognitive process of remembering.
Writing Systems and Active Externalism
Lambros Malafouris, in his 2013 book How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, applies the theory of active externalism to ancient writing systems. He suggests that, by doing so, we can use archaeological finds to understand not just what ancient people were thinking, but how they were thinking.
Looking at Linear B tablets, for example, we can observe several things. Firstly, there were two major types of tablets — small leaf-shaped tablets and large page-shaped tablets. Secondly, because the tablets were clay, no corrections could be applied after the clay had dried. Instead, any additions to what was originally written on a small tablet would have to be added to another small tablet and filed alongside the first one. From there, the information on the filed tablets could be taken together and recopied onto larger page-shaped tablets. Malafouris suggests that these tablets and the process of filing and recopying them externalizes and restructures the processing of information.
The process of writing on tablets, and the limitations of the materials used, mean that any information created must fit within a set spatial and temporal boundary. Creating and filing the tablets required a type of external problem-solving that may seem mundane to us, as modern literate people who are used to formatting and arranging information for written texts, but it would have been a significant cognitive development at the time. Emphasizing the possibilities that writing created for ancient cognition, Malafouris says: “The Mycenaean simply reads what the Linear B tablet remembers. In fact, being able to read, that person no longer needs to remember.”
It is important to note that, while the cognitive advancements early writing systems provided were significant, the ability to read and write was initially largely limited to scribes. It was not until much later that literacy became more widespread. However, these early advancements set the stage for further changes in the world’s informational landscape—changes which are still occurring in our society today.
Externalization and Technology Today
Since the advent of writing, many new technologies have been introduced, further changing the landscape of human cognition. Recent psychological studies have emphasized the role that the internet plays in mediating memory, problem-solving, and concentration. By creating new ways to store and relate information, the internet has been highlighted as a powerful tool for externalization.
Looking specifically at the externalization of memory, recent studies and scholarship have suggested that continual access to a wide variety of information has lessened people’s motivation to internally remember easily attained facts. Megan Kelly and Evan Risko’s 2022 study “Study effort and the memory cost of external store availability” finds that, when people knew that they could rely on external memory stores, like internet access, they were less likely to devote time to studying information and using other strategies, like mnemonics, to memorize information they had learned. This observation shows a change in the way that modern people store, process, and value information. When information can be readily accessed, there is much less value and utility in remembering it through internal processes.
Outside the rote memorization of facts, we can see this change occurring in other areas of day-to-day life. While people, even recently, had to rely on spatial memory for directions to frequented locations, the availability of GPS has somewhat limited the value of this type of memory. The memorization of phone numbers, too, has declined as most contact information has become easily available on smart-phones, and as new modes of contacting people, like social media, have become more common. Even the utilization of source memory—the internal memorization of where one has retrieved information—has decreased over time. A 2022 study titled “Did you look that up? How retrieving from smartphones affects memory for source” suggests that people are “more likely to take credit for retrieving information from memory after having truly accessed that information on a phone.”
Looking Ahead
The development of writing systems has dramatically changed the way that people process and store information. As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, the valuation and utilization of cognitive processes will likely continue to change and become more externalized. Consider, for example, the way that Artificial Intelligence has already changed the way that people can not only receive but generate information outside the confines of the mind.
Those who first developed writing systems, trying to create a way to keep track of administrative matters, could not have anticipated the way that their advancements have shaped societies, cultures, and the human mind. In this same vein, it is likely that new technologies—whether they be new apps, ways of communicating with friends and loved ones, or uses for AI—will bring new and unexpected changes to human cognition. The potential changes that will be brought forth by new technology, and by possible societal and ethical implications, leave many feeling wary of future advancements; looking ahead can be incredibly difficult. Therefore, I think it is useful at times to turn to the past, observing the changes that have already occurred and seeing where cognition first expanded from mind to matter.
Bibliography
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