I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING
How Recursion Shaped Mind, Language and Civilization

When Descartes wrote, ‘I think, therefore I am’, he was not just thinking, he was thinking about thinking. This is an example of recursion, in which one process is embedded in another.

In I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING, the distinguished psychologist Michael Corballis provides the first full exploration of the role of recursion in our mental lives – in thinking, memory, language. In doing so, he puts forward a fascinating new view of our understanding of human evolution in which recursion is seen as the primary characteristic that distinguishes the human mind from that of other animals.

Arguing against the idea that the mind evolved in modular fashion, he proposes that it is recursion that in fact unites many of the mental characteristics considered uniquely human. A primary force in the evolution of language, for example, was the recursive thinking implicit in theory of mind (knowing what is going on in the minds of others) and mental time travel (using our memory to consciously relive previous experiences).

As well as showing that language is exquisitely designed to communicate about events outside the present, Corballis outlines his original idea that language evolved as an embodied form of communication, originating in movements of the hands, and eventually shifting to gestures of the face and finally to the vocal organs – a radical shift in the very definition of language, and one that is is becoming more widely accepted.

In a final chapter the author attributes the striking advances in human technology and art of the past 100,000 years to a switch from a primarily gestural form of communication to speech, which freed the hands for external expression of previously internal thought processes. Communication is itself externalized in the form of writing, and memory in the form of engraved tablets, books, phonograph records, tapes, and computer chips. The recursive nature of thought is expressed externally as tools to make tools, wheels within wheels, machines within machines, computer programs within computer programs, and even, with Shakespeare, plays within plays. In other words, it was recursion – and not symbolic language – that triggered the so-called 'human revolution'. And it was this that, in turn, gave rise to civilization.

US Publisher: Princeton University Press
Delivery: Spring 2010
Pub date: Autumn 2010
Status: Proposal and sample chapters
Length: 90,000 words

World rights: Princeton University Press

For international rights contact Eric Schwartz at Princeton University Press