Collective Brains and Innovators

 I just attended a very interesting Cognitive Science Colloquium presentation by Joseph Henrich of Harvard University entitled "Collective brains and origins of innovation." I thought I'd jot down a few musings while they were still (relatively) fresh in my mind.

 My understanding of the basic argument is that we (humans) learn from all that is around us (in terms of neighborhoods, collaborators, etc), and that innovation is the outcome of the, often serendipitous, exchange of information that allows ideas to grow. For this reason, being enmeshed in a larger context (such as living in a big city) or a more diverse team allows for more innovative thinking. Henrich uses information on patents granted as a proxy for innovation to bolster some of these claims, using big data techniques to combine things such as census data, surnames (who is related to whom and/or from the same ethnic group), etc. That said, he also referenced the experimental research literature, ethnographic studies, and even the cross-species studies ("What do three-year-old humans and chimps have in common? What are the differences?") as part of his narrative. He is in the process of writing a twelve-chapter book, which will be out sometime next year and would be worth a read.

I'm not familiar with much or any of the literature that he is drawing on, so I had to take a lot of his argument at face value. He did have an amusing intro piece where he showed a list of 10-12 innovations (city centers, division of labor, weedkillers, etc.), presumably to set the stage for human intelligence, only to reveal that he was talking about ants. And this also illustrates his main point -- if we wanted to study those innovations in the ant world, we would not be looking at the behavior of individual ants, but rather at the behavior of the colony. That is kind of what he has in mind with the term "collective brain" -- the larger distributed cognition of the species is what drives innovation, not the heroic efforts of single brains in unique people. We have the advantage of all of the technical/cultural innovations that have come before us -- we don't need to reinvent springs or levers or government with every generation. 

The Q&A portion covered a wide range of topics, also revealing that he had done some fieldwork near Machu Picchu (his PhD is in anthropology, though he also has a BS in aerospace engineering, apparently.) And although I had not heard of him specifically, he was one of the folks involved in creating (or popularizing -- not quite sure) the "WEIRD" acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) that suggests a potential generalization flaw in most psychological research, as it has traditionally been conducted primarily in those populations. 

His talk made me think a lot about the book "Connected" which was all about the power of social networks in the sense that you are being influenced indirectly by things that you may not realize (e.g., a friend of a friend, with no connection to you, has an impact on your friend, which has an impact on you). Henrich mentioned a more "cultural evolution" type example where people in hot climates tend to eat spicy meat, without necessarily recognizing that the particular spices they use are good at holding some microbes at bay that would otherwise cause sickness. 

At times I felt that there might be a bit of a "just so" storytelling given the disparate pieces of information that he is pulling together, but he was able to respond to several questions in that vein with additional potential sources of evidence. It was an enjoyable talk and I'll probably look out for his new book (or perhaps read one of his other ones).