Triadic
Cognition
What
is it that we can do and most animal species can't
manage? Language, tool-making and tool-usage, music-making and music
perception, social cooperation (gjoint attentionh) and pictorial depth
perception (seeing the 3D depth in a 2D picture, painting, drawing or
photograph) come to mind.
Are
these all unrelated talents, or is there a commonality that allows certain
brains to handle these kinds of processes, and other brains to fail? The answer
is not easy, but there is a coherent cognitive mechanism at its core: these and
the other uniquely human talents are examples of "triadic
thinking" - having three simultaneous
processes in play at the same time. It sounds difficult, but it is something we
all do virtually all of the time. In general, the animal brain can handle two
items - associations between X and Y, but "conditional
associations" (X in relation to Y in
light of Z) are already beyond the cognitive capacities of our furry friends.
For us, it's easy - and easily demonstrated in
the realm of harmony perception and pictorial depth perception. Discussions of
these talents at the perceptual level (harmony and pictorial depth perception)
can be found here:
Empirical Musicology Review, 2006, Empirical Musicology
Review, 2007, Music Perception, 2007, Spatial
Vision, 2007, Empirical
Studies of the Arts, 2008, American Scientist, 2008, Music Perception,
2009
and
the full cognitive story will be published in: Harmony,
Perspective and Triadic Cognition (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011).
Why
is it that only the human brain can do three-way associations? The answer comes
from 19th Century neuroanatomy. With the exception of a small sliver
of neocortex in the superior temporal sulcus of the chimpanzee brain, only the
human brain has significant expanses of trimodal association neocortex. These
are cortical areas at which sensory information from the visual, auditory and
touch modalities converge on the same neurons. And it is there that the
algorithms for triadic processing first evolved. Brodmann Areas 39 and 40 in
posterior cortex are trimodal and portions of prefrontal cortex are also.
Prefrontal cortex is where "conditional
associations" are formed. See Terry
Deacon's, The Symbolic Species, for a
discussion of the brain localization of conditional associations and see
Michael Tomasello's, The Cultural Origins
of Human Cognition, for a slightly different perspective on "triadic cognition".
RETURN to Top Page