A spider sits at the centre of a web. The web that she wove, from strands of silk secreted by her own body. Each one of her eight limbs is placed precariously on a string of the web, feeling for the subtle vibrations that might indicate she’s ensnared a fly. These vibrations from the web are the same vibrations she feels in her limbs, which spring her into action to strike down her prey. The web is literally a part of her; she created it, her body and limbs entwine with it, and she uses it to receive information about the world around her. So, can we separate spider from web? Is the web merely a passive “tool” used by the spider? Where does the spider’s body end, and the web begin?
So, can we separate spider from web? Is the web merely a passive “tool” used by the spider? Where does the spider’s body end, and the web begin?
These questions and perspectives resonate with fundamental ideas from Gregory Bateson’s (1973) Blind Man’s Stick hypothesis. If you consider a blind man using his stick to receive tactile information about the world, information that replaces visual information for a seeing person, where can we say the blind man ends and the stick begins? The stick provides important sensory information about the world, just as our sensory organs relay information about heat, scent, or sound, that aids the blind man in responding appropriately to the world around him. Bateson’s Blind Man’s Stick hypothesis was furthered by another perspective presented by Clark and Chalmers (1998): the extended mind. In this, Clark and Chalmers present the example of a person with Alzheimer’s disease that relies on a notebook to recall important information. They argue that part of cognitive function is extended to include this notebook, and thus, in a very real sense, the notebook becomes an externalised or extended part of the brain. Ingold (2008) and Japyassú and Laland (2017), among others, also draw inspiration from spiders and their webs to challenge the way we understand cognition, ourselves, and the way we interact with the material world.
Western people tend towards a Cartesian perspective of the world; we assume that “we” (i.e., our conscious selves) are bounded within our brains, that our brains are nothing more than pilots of the fleshy vessel of our body, and that we use tools or materials to achieve certain objectives in the world, but discard these after our goal has been achieved. Yet a raft of disciplines has increasingly demonstrated this perspective is inaccurate. For example, medical and health sciences have shown the lived experience of the body is intimately interconnected with the lived experience of the mind, encouraging more holistic approaches to treating patients. Other disciplines have further explored this phenomenon neurologically, demonstrating the mind is plastic and actively incorporates a tool when we use it to receive further information about the world. The use of tools and materials appears to extend our peripersonal space– the space that we readily identify as within arm’s reach and is closely associated to our sense of self (think, your personal space that is invaded if a stranger stands too close) – to include the object.
The use of tools and materials appears to extend our peripersonal space– the space that we readily identify as within arm’s reach and is closely associated to our sense of self (think, your personal space that is invaded if a stranger stands too close) – to include the object.
These examples demonstrate that all of us use objects to extend our self, creating a material interface with the world which allows us to store and receive information in the tangible things that surround us every day. Whether it’s relying on glasses to receive additional visual information about the world, writing down important information in a notebook so that you can recall it later, externalising memories in the form of physical and digital images, or using a calculator whilst doing mental arithmetic. Smart phones are perhaps the clearest example of this integration of an external material object into our cognitive and behavioural functioning, with many of us actively externalising cognitive processes to incorporate these devices. We even use these devices as an interface for social connection, and simultaneously use them to carefully curate our social persons. This is more than just the passive use of materials as tools, where we can neatly put a box around us and the tool and identify them as separate; this is the active integration of materials as a literal part of ourselves, to the extent they inform our behaviours and identity. Yet this does not appear to be a symptom of living in the hyper-digital and material Western world. The inherent plasticity of our minds means we are prone to seamlessly integrate objects, as if they were an extra limb or organ.
Smart phones are perhaps the clearest example of this integration of an external material object into our cognitive and behavioural functioning.
In this sense, the way our mind works is similar to the spider sitting at the centre of her web. Our cognition is not a bounded process that only takes place in the brain, but is distributed across our bodies and the materials we interact with on a daily basis. We are not bounded biological entities, but grafted together through biological, material, and technological components: provocatively cyborg in nature. For anthropologists and archaeologists, the idea of extended bodies and minds presents us with a new perspective for which to understand past people. The scraps of materials we excavate and uncover are not only indicative of technological capabilities, but perhaps quite literally represent the parts of past people’s minds and identities.
In this sense, the way our mind works is similar to the spider sitting at the centre of her web.
References:
Bateson, G. (1973) Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. London: Granada.
Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998) ‘The Extended Mind.’ Analysis 58 (1): 7 – 19.
Ingold, T. (2008) When ANT meets SPIDER: Social theory for arthropods. In: C., Knappett and L., Malafouris (Eds.) Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer.
Japyassú, H.F. and Laland, K.N. (2017) ‘Extended spider cognition.’ Animal Cognition 20: 375 – 395.
Izzy Wisher is an archaeologist, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to Palaeolithic art. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University (Denmark), working alongside cognitive scientists on the ERC project eSYMb: The Early Evolution of Symbolic Behaviour. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Durham University (UK), where she used virtual reality and methods from psychology to understand how pareidolia – the phenomenon of seeing forms in random patterns, like faces in clouds – influenced the production of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in northern Spain.
