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Thinking outside the frame

Robert Ornstein

We commonly view development as an expansive process: growing larger, with more capabilities both intellectual and physical. And our view of "progress" of human society is often along the same lines: we now have computers, moon shots, telecommunication where there were once campfires and slingshots. True enough, but development is actually a matter of restricting alternatives, and this restriction goes on within each individual and in society. Where a baby can speak and learn 10,000 or so possible languages, in adulthood there rarely a half dozen. Where the visual system has billions of potential connections at birth, in adulthood there is 1/100th of those at the beginning. We grow along the lines of highest benefit. Societies too, evolve and develop along the lines of most advantage: highest surviving offspring, most money. And the successes of the western technological culture have proven most powerful in the last era. Unknown to each of us, we come into the world having absorbed the restrictions of our successful society into our minds, having given up many of our innate problem-solving creative abilities, even before we are old enough to realise it. This lecture traces the social developments that have changed our minds over the past few millennia and also considers many of the new technologies that offer us a chance to reclaim our innate problem-solving abilities.

Dr. Robert Ornstein received his PhD at Stanford University in 1968. His thesis, On the Experience of Time, received the American Institutes for Research Creative Talent Award and is still in print as a book. Since then he has written some 20 books on the nature of the human mind, brain, and their relationship to thought, health, and individual and social consciousness. He won the American Psychological Association's Master Lecture Award and has received commendations from UNESCO, UNICEF and others. His most recent books are The Evolution of Human Consciousness, The Axemaker's Gift (with James Burke) and The Right Mind, a re-evaluation of the research on the functions of the two sides of the brain, the research area with which Dr. Ornstein is most associated.