Brain #3: Five C's

“Social reality” is a concept that exists only in the human brain, writes Lisa Barrett in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Social reality is anything we consider real though nothing in physics or chemistry would make it real – examples include national borders; or the idea that a specific portion of the earth’s orbit around the sun is January.

 

Scientists believe that the ability to construct social reality is because of a suite of capabilities of the (human) brain called the Five C’s.

Creativity: Someone needs to decide to draw a line and call it the border of a “country”, then define what a country is. That needs creativity.

Communication: The idea of a country can be explained to others. Via, say, language.

Copying: This refers to the ability to teach and learn the practices of others. Only if newcomers and children can be taught or if one can learn the customs of a new place can social reality continue to exist for very long periods.

Cooperation: We can work together in unimaginably large numbers to produce things. Someone mines the metal; another person transports it to a factory; the factory workers mould it into a useful shape; a shopkeeper sells it you.

 

The last “C” is compression. This one requires a longer explanation. The raw signals from our sense organs travel onwards to the next set of neurons. Some of it was already predicted, others are new. The new sense data is then forwarded to the next set of neurons, which compress it into summaries. These summaries are passed to still larger, more highly connected neurons where summarizes the summaries. And so on it continues.

“Ok, your brain can make a big, fat, compressed summary of summaries of summaries. What does this have to do with social reality?”

Well, compress the data enough and eventually it becomes an abstraction. In this context: Abstraction is our ability to see meaning in symbols or objects – we see meaning not just in their physical form, but in terms of their function or intent. Thus, objects that look nothing like each other – a bottle of wine, and a gold wristwatch – can both be interpreted as “gifts”. Abstraction thus allows us to associated multiple meanings to the same object.

 

Many species have the Five C’s to varying degrees:

“In humans, however, the Five C’s intertwine and reinforce one another, which lets us take things to a whole other level.”