About 50,000 years ago we started to mash up incompatible concepts – and everything from science to fashion is the result
THERE are many things that humans can't do. We can't run like cheetahs, fly like eagles or echolocate insects like bats. But the human contribution to the miracle of life is obvious: we are the origin of new ideas.
We hit upon new ideas, lots of them, on the fly, all the time. They arise constantly in our minds, and sometimes tumble out to influence other minds and change the world.
How do we do it? How does our thinking leap beyond our existing knowledge to make new ideas? The answer is that we blend multiple ideas that are already in our minds, and these blends contain new ideas that didn't exist before.
Blending is a basic mental operation, and many species may be capable of creating rudimentary blends. Imagine, for instance, a dog that has learned the game of fetch from its master, who exploited the dog's instinct to retrieve. The dog's notion of playing fetch includes its master, but not me. Yet if I walk up to the dog with a ball, it might be able to blend its idea of playing fetch with its idea of me, so that, in the blend, there is something new. I'm now the one who throws the ball for the dog.
That is a simple blend, combining compatible notions. But human beings seem to have taken an additional step up the blending ladder. At some point, perhaps in the Upper Palaeolithic era, which began around 50,000 years ago, we developed the ability to blend ideas that are in strong conflict, or incompatible. This advanced blending capacity is the source of our creativity.
Consider the "lion man" ivory figurine, which was carved at least 32,000 years ago, and discovered, smashed to bits, in a cave in southern Germany in 1939 (its gender is actually indeterminate, but I have adopted the term "lion man" for ease of reference). Its shards lay neglected for decades, but since its reassembly in 1998 scientists have pointed to this figurine as evidence of the emergence of human creativity. What the figurine clearly shows is the mental ability to blend different concepts: lion and man are not merely held in mind at the same time, they are also used to create a new, blended, concept – a lion man, who is neither a lion nor a man. We would never confuse lions and men, yet, without being deluded, we can blend them to create a new idea. On top of this, we also blend our idea of the lion man with our idea of the carved ivory to conceive of the representation.
This may seem elementary. All over the world today, people constantly discern and create representations. Children see things in the clouds: dragons, ships, trees. People use twigs to sketch figures in the sand. But this capacity isn't elementary at all. If a person living before the Upper Palaeolithic era had possessed the flexible, creative ability for blending, he or she should have had no difficulty carving a face in stone. Yet not a single representation of a face – or anything else – has been found in the archaeological record prior to the era of the cave paintings in Europe.
One might argue that an advanced culture is needed to foster such creativity, but culture, I contend, is made possible by the capacity for advanced blending. In evolutionary terms, this capacity – and with it, the ability to create representations of our ideas – emerged fairly recently. And once it did, it changed practically everything.
Blends like the idea of the lion man can mislead us into thinking that blending is strange, rare and noticeable. On the contrary, it happens all the time, with most of it invisible to consciousness, proceeding quickly in the powerful backstage of cognition, where we can manage complex operations far beyond the capacity of consciousness.
Let's take an everyday example: the cyclic day. In our experience, there is one day and then another day and so on, in a sequence that stretches out indefinitely, forward and backward. The days in that sequence are all quite different. They don't repeat. But day after day after day, indefinitely, is too much to comprehend, too much to fit inside our working memory. It isn't mentally portable. So we blend these different days into a conception of a cyclic day.
There are analogies and disanalogies across the different days we experience. The analogies are packed into one thing in the blend: the day. The disanalogies are packed into change for that thing: the day starts over every dawn and repeats – in other words it is cyclic. Because of blending, all the days that have ever happened or will happen can be packed into a tight, tractable, manageable, human-scale idea – the cyclic day.
The cyclic day isn't just an abstraction. There is new stuff in the blend that isn't in any of the individual days in the mental web to which the blend can be applied. Indeed, almost no blend consists exclusively of a structure that is equally shared by all the ideas upon which the blend draws. The concept of the lion man, for example, is not an abstraction of what is common to the concepts of "lion" and "man".
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