Original Intelligence: The Architecture of the Human Mind

Professor Premack has spent a long, productive career as a pioneer in the field of animal and human mind and intelligence. By working with human babies too young to have been influenced by culture and education, he has been able to explore and interpret the innate cognitive architecture of the human brain. He has found that babies as young as four months are equipped with intuitions about the basic content of the world, intuitions that permit him or her to distinguish physical and psychological objects, do arithmetic and understand music, as well as to develop language. He shows that evolution has also equipped us with a psychological module that prepares us to recognize intentional objects and to attribute states of mind to them, providing a theoretical basis for social skills. A physical module provides an innate sense of cause and analogy. The maths sense, which we share with many other animals, allows even the infant to grasp proportions and the concepts of more and less. This volume presents a theory of the architecture of the human brain, arguing that if we understand the innate properties of the human mind, we can facilitate learning by linking invented systems to natural ones. The authors explain how our educational methods should be reformed to take advantage of the tools that evolution has given us.

About the Author :
David Premack Ph.D. is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. A pioneer, with Ann, in chimpanzee language study, they showed why chimps cannot acquire human language. Premack proposed a theory of reward or reinforcement still used after forty years (Premack Principle), and introduced the concept of Theory of Mind, a keystone of human social intelligence. His book The Mind of an Ape, which he wrote with Ann Premack, summarized his work on animal intelligence and was given an award by the American Psychological Association. Ann Premack's book Why Chimps Can Read was featured in "New and Noteworthy" in the New York Times and translated into five languages. She is an editor of Causal Cognition, and listed in Who's Who in the World.