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Quote by James David Lewis-Williams

“Seeing’ two-dimensional images is therefore something that we learn to do; it is not an inevitable part of being human.”

Quote by James David Lewis-Williams

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

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The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

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James David Lewis-Williams

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“Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

“For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.”

Consciousness Upper Palaeolithic Art

Book:The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Source: The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art