Humphrey, Nicholas

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Shamanism and cognitive evolution [Commentary on Michael Winkelman].

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

1Commentary on Michael Winkelman, ‘Shamanism and cognitive evolution’
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12, 91-3, 2002
From Nicholas Humphrey, Centre for Philosophy of  Natural and Social Science, London
School of Economics, Houghton Street,  London WC2A 2A.
‘The shamanic context of cave art is attested by a number of features’, Michael Winkelman
writes (p.6); and, scarcely pausing for breath,  he proceeds to reel off as if they were matters
of established fact a list of conjectures about the authorship and meaning of ice-age cave
paintings. We are to conclude, without question apparently,  that  ‘cave art images represent
shamanic activities and altered states of consciousness, and the subterranean rock art sites
were used for shamanic vision questing’ (p. 7). Well, may be. The shaman hypothesis  is
certainly an intriguing one; and David Lewis-Williams, in particular, has made a plausible
case for it.  Yet my own first reaction is: not so fast. For one thing, I myself, in the pages of
this Journal a few years ago, presented evidence which –  to begin with, anyway –  suggests
that any such  interpretation has to be completely mistaken.
In ‘Cave art, autism and the evolution of the human mind’ (Humphrey 1998), I
compared the style and content of ice-age art  (in particular the paintings at Chauvet) with the
drawings of a four year old aut istic savant , Nadia –  a severely retarded girl who had virtually 
no language and no ability to think conceptually. I pointed to remarkable resemblances in
style and content between the cave paintings and Nadia’s.  I noted the surprising fact that
drawings of this quality are never produced by untrained art ists today unless they are autistic,
and indeed  that the precondition for the ‘release’ of this artistic ability in modern human
beings seems to be the lack of interference from ‘higher-level’ cognitive elaboration.  And on
this basis I tentat ively suggested that the ice-age artists themselves may have been operat ing
at a pre-linguistic non-conceptual level.
Now, at first sight, there might seem to be little room for negotiation here, between
Winkelman’s grandiose view of the significance of cave art as the work of shamans and my
deflationary view of it as the work of individuals who, at least compared to modern-day
humans, were cognitively backward. If the cave artists were shamans then presumably they
had the capacity for quite sophisticated conceptual thought. 
Yet, even before reading Winkelman’s paper, I had  begun to wonder  whether this
way of putting things, as a simple either-or antithesis, might  be obscuring  a  more complex
and interesting truth. What if shamans resembled autistic savants some of the time? What if
the very activity of shamanising rendered these people in some respects  functionally autistic,
2so that at the time they made the drawings they were  temporarily in a non-conceptualising
state of mind? Given new ideas about the origins of savant skills, I think there is  reason to
take this possibility seriously.
The key work is that of psychologist Alan Snyder (Snyder 1997, 1999; see also
Birbaumer 1999, Humphrey 2002). Snyder has pointed out (as indeed have others before
him) that the  human brain normally acts like a filter, passing into conscious awareness only
a highly edited and constructed picture of the world.  In order to arrive at  this picture the
brain must take account of a mass of raw sensory information,  store the details at least
transiently, and apply a set of basic computational algorithms to make sense of them. But, in
the normal course of events these details and  the algorithms are lost to sight, being
overshadowed –  or even actively suppressed – by the larger picture which supercedes them. 
In the case of autistic savants, however, Snyder suggests that the details are not
overshadowed, for the simple reason that these savants are not capable of constructing the
larger picture. Thus the raw information is left, as it were,  on open display. ‘We believe that
artistic savants have direct access to “lower” levels of neural information prior to it being
integrated into the holistic picture, the ultimate label. All of us possess this same lower-level
information, but we cannot normally access it.’ (Snyder 1999, p. 588). So, for example, ‘the
autistic savant Nadia can directly tap the way in which our brain derives perspective, whereas
normal individuals cannot’.
But, if this right, it raises immediately a tantalising possibility. If normal people do
store low level  information at least transiently, then maybe by somehow mimicking the non-
conceptualising state they  too could keep this information open to  view. As Snyder asks at
the end of a recent paper: ‘Although we do not normally have access to lower levels of
information as do savants, is there nonetheless some artificial means to promote this access,
say via induced altered states of  consciousness?’ [my italics] (Snyder 1999, p. 592). 
The relevance to the Winkelman / Lewis Williams  thesis  will be apparent. Suppose
it is t rue,  as I would still maintain, that only  someone with a savant-like mind could possibly
have  produced cave paintings such as exist at Chauvet.  But suppose now it is also true that
an otherwise normal person by entering an altered state of consciousness which  suppresses
conceptualisation could acquire savant-like skills. Then shamans might indeed have been
cave artists. 
But this argument depends, of course, on there being independent evidence that 
altered states really can have the effect that Snyder suggests. I think there is in fact already
highly suggestive evidence for it in some of the older  literature on psychotropic drugs – and
perhaps most tellingly in Aldous Huxley’s classic account of his experiments with mescalin, 
The Doors of Perception (Huxley 1954). 
3As Huxley describes it, one of the effects of mescalin is precisely to remove the
‘tyranny’ of higher order concepts. ‘Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye
recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not
immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. . .  These effects of mescalin are
the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power
to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve’ (p. 25-6).  What is  revealed is ‘the
infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualised event’
(p. 26).
And  Huxley places his  mescalin-induced  experiences within a context that closely
prefigures Snyder’s. ‘Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent
Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more
seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put
forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function
of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not
productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever
happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
The function of the brain and nervous system is to  protect  us from being overwhelmed and
confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of
what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very
small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a
theory, each of one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But . .. Mind at Large has to be
funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system’ (p. 22-3).
Now, if mescalin can indeed have the effect  of temporarily by-passing the reducing
valve and thus opening the door to a savant-like level of raw cognition, then surely other
consciousness altering techniques can do the same.  As Huxley suggests, ‘Temporary by-
passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual
exercises”, or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs’ (p. 24).   In which case, we may  well
imagine that some of these techniques were in fact available to those ice-age shamans. 
This  is of course no more than speculation. Nonetheless I think we can now  guess at
a scenario that  would reconcile Winkelman’s views and my own – although only by showing
each of us to have been partly wrong in our assumptions. Yes, the cave art was made by
human beings with savant-like minds; but not, as my earlier thesis implied, by human beings
who were savant-like by nature. Yes, the cave art  was made by shamans; but not, as
Winkelman believes, by shamans giving expression to high level symbolic thought. Instead,
let’s imagine those artists,  deep within the caves, suffused with music and dance, inspired by
whatever constituted their ice-age soma, their memories primed, their senses sharpened, 
4regressing to the state of  ‘innocent  perception’ of which Huxley speaks.  Perhaps it was in
that state that they were able to recall in quasi-photographic detail the sightings of wild 
animals; in that state that they were  able to trace the outlines of these images as if  projected
by a lantern onto the cave wall .
Huxley does not write in The Doors of Perception about ice-age art. But he does
compare his mescalin experience to the work of painters. ‘”The nearest approach to this,” I
said, “would be a Vermeer.” Yes, a Vermeer’ (p. 38). Remarkably enough, it has now been
established that Vermeer , in all his later and most famous paintings, used  a lens to project
an optical image on to a canvas on the wall of his studio  and then traced the image
(Steadman 2001). Although he used a camera rather than savant imagination, Vermeer
himself may have been  returning to the  visionary roots of human art.
References
Birbaumer, N., 1999, Rain Man’s revelations. Nature, 399, 211-12.
Humphrey, N., 1998, Cave art, autism, and the evolution of the human mind.  Cambridge
Archaeological Journal, 8 (2), 165-91.
Humphrey, N.,  2002, The deformed transformed. Chapter 14 in The Mind Made Flesh:
Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huxley, A., 1954. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper & Row.
Snyder, A., 1997, Autistic artists give clues to cognition. Perception, 26, 93-6.
Snyder, A., 1999, Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing?: the mind’s secret
arithmetic. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, 266, 587-92.
Steadman, P., 2001, Vermeer’s Camera. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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