90 Book Reviews

As a further step in attempting to redefine the enterprise of research on learning, this book makes an important contribution. It defines a central feature of situated learning, i.e. the particular mode of engagement of a learner participating in the actual practice of an expert, and points to specific aspects of this feature that may regulate learning. Lave and Wenger invite the reader to question assumptions about the nature of learning and knowledge, and the goals ofcognitive psychology. For this reason their book is provocative and worthwhile reading.

REFERENCES

Bereiter, C. (1 985). Toward a solution of the learning paradox. Review of Educational Research,

Brown, J. S. , Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning.

Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life.

ELANA JORAM University of Pittsburgh

55,201-226.

Educational Researcher, 18,3242.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Making your mind up

ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND: THREE STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE AND COGNITION. Merlin Donald, Harvard University Press, 1991. No. of pages viii + 41 3. ISBN 0 674 64483 2 (hard cover). Price €22.25.

Or should it be the ‘Post-Modern Mind’? This is in any event a complex book, attempting as it does to synthesize material from a variety of directions, neuropsychology, psycholinguis- tics, human evolution research and memory research comprising the majority of it. It is the latest, and in some respects the subtlest, in a genre of texts striving to integrate evolutionary and cognitivist perspectives to provide updated diagnoses of the human condition. Unlike most of these, however, Donald’s incorporates extensive reviews of the history and current state of play in such areas as brain-localization (particularly good), linguistics and memory. He emerges from these reviews with a distinctive theoretical model of his own. In outline, he proposes a sequence of stages by which the exclusively episodic memory system of typical mammals is transformed, via a phase of ‘mimetic’ representation (present in primates to a limited extent), into the modern human’s ‘symbolic’ mode (enter language), each in turn enveloping and transforming the functioning of its predecessor. The subtitle notwithstanding, this is a four-stage model since the final, non-biological, development is the advent of ‘external symbolic storage’ (ESS) in the form of writing and a myriad other technological innovations, from statues to computer discs. This final apotheosis radically transforms the functioning of the human memory system, rendering it effectively collective and requiring every individual to master a vast network of ESS accessing skills, while demoting rote-memorizing, collective mimetic ritual and the like.

The ESS greatly enhances cognitive achievement. It enables us to move from ‘oral-mythic’ to ‘theoretic’ culture (Comte’s ghost hovering unacknowledged here) and allows us to abstract from the ESS an ‘external memory field’ (EXMF) with which to engage in extended cognitive tasks beyond the capacity of the biological working memory alone. The individual now emerges as an active nodal point or ‘monad’ in a vast ESS network, analogous (surprise, surprise) to a computer able to link into other computing systems, drive peripheral devices and delegate complex computations. Foraging in the ESS, it seems, we omnipotently rove both temporally and geographically, now E-mailing Tokyo, now calling up biblographies of medieval theology, now cancelling our standing orders, now planting a scanned palaeolithic image in the middle of a pop-concert poster on our DTP system. Hence my opening aside! This isn’t Modern (i.e. progressive, future-oriented, optimistic, existentially-isolated or whatever) but Post- Modern.

Under such circumstances the precise location of human memory becomes a moot point,

Book Reviews 91

oscillating in Donald’s view all the way between the individual’s internal episodic memory and other cerebral regions to the ESS itself (McLuhan, where are you?). In his initial analysis of modern brain functioning, Donald had placed at the highest level a ‘linguistic controller’ capable of reflecting on its own outputs (hence human reflexive consciousness); now even this is capable of being overridden by the culturally constructed ESS itself, e.g. when passively watching television. In a final flurry, Donald claims that all this places humans in ‘a different order’, notwithstanding genetic similarities to chimpanzees. The advent of the ESS constitutes “one of the greatest reconfigurations of cognitive structure in mammalian history, without major genetic change”.

A number of points need to be made about this. Firstly, the underlying plot is actually a reversion to a standard nineteenth-century one in which humans are essentially special, and in which the rise to the present is via a fixed series of cultural stages. The soul is replaced by a linguistic controller; savagery, barbarism and civilization by mimetic, oral-mythic and ESS ‘theoretic’ cultures. It is also, somewhat Eurocentric, particularly in its failure to mention Indian culture. Thus Donald glowingly presents Greek culture as the key turning point from oral-mythic to theoretic culture and ‘metalinguistic’ awareness, although analyses of grammar and phonetics were already part of Vedic culture by the time of Plato and such universities as Benares, dating back to perhaps 1000 BC, taught curricula not very different from the medieval Trivium and Quadrivium. This exemplifies the very impressionistic character of Donald’s lightning tour of the rise of civilization-‘if this is Rhetoric it must be Athens’.

More positively, however, by placing the concept of the ESS firmly on the map, Donald does cognitive psychology an important service. Experimental research on memory has too long suffered in plausibility not simply by being ‘ecologically invalid’ but also by focusing exclusively on the individual as its locus. It is widely forgotten that Bartlett’s classic monograph was subtitled ‘A study in experimental and social psychology’, while writers such as Halbwachs, and more recently Romanyshyn, have stressed both the cultural dimensions of memory and the role of external phenomena in its maintenance (not to mention the current social construc- tionist approaches represented in e.g. Middleton and Edward’s Collective remembering, or the lessons of Yates’s The art ofrnemory). At the very least a reappraisal of the nature of memory research is in order. It is also now clearer than ever that psychology in general, and cognitive psychology in particular, need to take account of an evolutionary perspective if they are to provide a comprehensive account of the human psyche. If, as an evolution story, Donald’s plot remains in some respects simplistic, the theoretical benefit of attempting to embed neuropsychology, models of cognitive architecture, and memory functioning within an evolutionary framework is enormous. It forces a number of fundamental questions into the open and compels anyone engaging in it to encompass a far wider range of variables than is usually demanded in the laboratory; the ecological validity of psychological theories has to include the ecology of the Ice Age as well as the campus.

Donald’s book is ultimately a programmatic one, a basis on which to build. Inevitably his levels of expertise vary somewhat between topics. He is much better on modern memory research than on theories of Upper Palaeolithic art, for instance. He has understandable difficulty, too, in finding exactly the right level at which to pitch the argument, sometimes expatiating a little too long-windedly in an introductory fashion (e.g. regarding varieties of language deficit and effects of brain damage), at others rising to a technical specialist level. His model of brain functioning is particularly worth close peer-evaluation, and his strictures on the neglect of the possibility of individual differences in brain functioning are also important. But finally 1 am wondering what his next move will be. He leaves us hovering between the siren song of Churchlandish neuroscientific scientism and the covertly social constructionist implications of the ESS model itself, and I am not at all sure he has spotted this. Final verdict-an important, perhaps essential book, though not quite so radical and evolutionary as the dust-jacket eulogies suggest.

GRAHAM RICHARDS University of East London