THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYoptimizing recruitment, office structure and staff training. Educa-
tional psychologists work in schools and local authorities, helping and
assessing children with special educational needs and advising on school
policies and practices. There are also sports psychologists working with
individual athletes and teams, helping improve training, boosting team
cohesion and guiding positive thinking.
Of course there are also forensic or criminal psychologists, made
famous through fictional dramas like the UK television series Cracker.
Most forensic psychologists work in prisons or other secure institutions,
What is cognitive archaeology?
Like many academic disciplines, psychology is forever fragmenting
into ever finer and newer specialisms. An apt example is the emerging
field of cognitive archaeology – a marriage between psychology and
neuroscience on the one hand and archaeology on the other. This new
field is founded on the idea that archaeological artefacts can shed
light on how the human mind evolved. Cave drawings reveal evidence
of symbolic thought, while ever more intricate tools are a physical
manifestation of early humans’ evolving ability to plan ahead and
share technological advances.
As an example of cognitive archaeological research, consider a
recent study by Dietrich Stout at the Institute of Archaeology and
Thierry Chaminade at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in
London. They and their colleagues scanned the brains of three archae-
ologists with the rare ability to perform two types of early Stone Age
tool-making, dating from between 2.6 and 0.25 million years ago: the
creation of Oldowan stone chips and the crafting of more complex
Acheulean cutting tools. As the archaeologists performed their
dextrous skills in the brain scanner, a raft of visuo-motor regions were
activated, with the Acheulean technique exercising a more extensive
network than the Oldowan. Crucially, both techniques activated
areas that overlap with language-related brain regions, leading the
researchers to conclude that increasingly skill-intensive tool use may
have co-evolved with language in a mutually reinforcing way.
One issue at the heart of cognitive archaeology is what’s known
as the “sapient paradox”. This is the observation that our genetic
make-up has remained virtually unchanged for the last sixty thousand
years even while the human mind appears to have evolved rapidly
in terms of cultural practices, and the use of numbers and written
language. This turns on its head the traditional idea that biological
evolution drove the progress of human culture, and instead suggests
that cultural and technical innovations unleashed the potential of the
human brain.