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The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”

When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.

More than mere replication is going on.

we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.

” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.

there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates

A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.

Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.

when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”

The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.

reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.

can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.

That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.

Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”

Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.

the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.

In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”

free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”

We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.

It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.

I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

“I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.

recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s

“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”

In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.

The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.

there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin

or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status

Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.

social status

second kind of status. We call this status prestige.

from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,

From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige

give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back

you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future

some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?

may have started early

another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.

here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.

Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago

400,000 years ago

there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees

In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.

we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model

for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.

trying out different technique

take advantage of the variation

the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?

only humans have it

humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down

idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies

Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.

when societies begin to get big and complex

large-scale cooperation

What are the causal processes that bring these things about?

There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques

I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.

there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony

they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups

In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.

but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.

if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,

more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor

ritual plays a role in this

rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith

elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods

high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind

Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;

People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite

We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.

There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust

In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning

We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language

, it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.

what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.

you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.

One possible exception to that is bird song.

One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.

looking at a case study in Tasmania.

You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn

You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member

study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline

larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,

more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.

rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies

As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.

An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.

Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.

a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have

I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.

Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife

pushes us towards polygyny

But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?

European Marriage Pattern,

Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage

people are ready to moralize it,

it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks

If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,

especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny

to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course

Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution. 

Culture is part of our biology.

We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.

Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,

A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.

One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.

at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.

behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent

The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.

I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this

I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?

they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.

over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games

we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.

able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.

there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.

measured market integration much more carefully

subsequent project

large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.

did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.

Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.

This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers

one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game

three measures of fairness

size of the community predicts willingness to punish

suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.

It could be some kind of reputational mechanism

There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.

In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.

This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.

but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances

these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers

large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.

if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.

A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin

In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.

Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion

adherence to a world religion matters

People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger

Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.

political scientists call it the rule of law

those rules apply independently of the identities

If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.

ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.

Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in [51]) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding.

Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks.[49] This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain.

However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS,[54] but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system.

The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his/her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another.

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.