Is mental time travel what makes us human?
A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us.
Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization. Mental time travel and theory of mind, Corballis believes, are two uniquely human ways of thinking that propelled our species to heights above all others, thanks to what is called recursion.
The concept of recursion became an evolutionists’ darling largely on the heels of a paper written in 2002 by Marc Hauser, Tecumseh Fitch and Noam Chomsky. That paper, propelled to international notice by the participation of its famous third author, claimed that it’s a unique human trick to communicate by embedding structures within other structures, as when one noun phrase in a sentence is made to contain another. An example of such linguistic recursion is furnished by Corballis. The non-recursive sentences “Jane loves John” and “Jane flies aeroplanes” may be combined to produce the recursive sentence “Jane, who flies aeroplanes, loves John”. Less interested in language than the mind itself, Corballis states flatly that recursion is “the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals”.