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Many elements of culture made their first appearance in the Upper Paleolithic. Previous hypotheses put forth to explain this unprecedented burst of creativity are found wanting. Examination of the psychological basis of creativity leads to…
This paper proposes that the distinctively human capacity for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended cultural evolution came about through two temporally-distinct cognitive transitions. First, the origin of Homo-specific culture over two MYA was…
We tested the computational feasibility of the proposal that open-ended cultural evolution was made possible by two cognitive transitions: (1) onset of the capacity to chain thoughts together, followed by (2) onset of contextual focus (CF):…
This paper summarizes efforts to computationally model two transitions in the evolution of human creativity: its origins about two million years ago, and the 'big bang' of creativity about 50,000 years ago. Using a computational model of…
At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in a new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain…
LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language…
A variant of microcephalin, MCPH1 gene, was introgressed about 37,000 years ago into Homo sapiens genetic pool from an archaic (Homo erectus) lineage and rose to exceptionally high frequency of around 70 percent worldwide today. It is…
As artificial intelligence (AI) models become routinely integrated into knowledge work, cognitive acts increasingly occur in two distinct modes: individually, using biological resources alone, or distributed across a human-AI system.…
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…
The human brains are organized into hierarchically modular networks facilitating efficient and stable information processing and supporting diverse cognitive processes during the course of development. While the remarkable reconfiguration…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction…
Recent studies have suggested a processing framework for multilingual inputs in decoder-based LLMs: early layers convert inputs into English-centric and language-agnostic representations; middle layers perform reasoning within an…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Formal languages are essential for computer programming and are constructed to be easily processed by computers. In contrast, natural languages are much more challenging and instigated the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). One…
In order to keep trace of information and grow up, the infant brain has to resolve the problem about where old information is located and how to index new ones. We propose that the immature prefrontal cortex (PFC) use its primary…
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but…
Reasoning is a fundamental substrate for solving novel and complex problems. Deliberate efforts in learning and developing frameworks around System 2 reasoning have made great strides, yet problems of sufficient complexity remain largely…
Dual process models of cognition suggest there are two kinds of thought: rapid, automatic Type 1 processes, and effortful, controlled Type 2 processes. Models of creative thinking also distinguish between two sets of processes: those…
The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterised by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by…