Bringing History to Mind A late 19th century Gabon Harp, which depicts the merging between human form and music that occurs when playing music or in dance, and which is itself made from skin and gut as well as wood. Image © National Museums Scotland Our eight recorded seminars have clearly got people thinking about how ideas from the contemporary distributed cognition framework relate to various historical precursors, analogues and expressions of those ideas. Here are just three of the connections that have been made in the online discussions. Firstly, it has been proposed that ancient experiences of theatre and oratory may be illuminated using the concept of the socially extended individual mind. Secondly, that a modern embodied perspective on language might have more in common with the medieval/renaissance conception of language as idea-carrying breath than it does with other more recent perspectives. Thirdly, that the notion of the body that emerged during the sixteenth century may underpin a distinctive kind of distributed view.Meanwhile, in theoretical mode, contributors have wondered about the range of ways in which cognitive states and processes might be spread out over social groups and institutions, about the multiple dimensions of distributed memory, and about the role of semiotics in distributed cognition. And splits have already emerged! For instance, while a worry has been voiced that the various versions of distributed cognition might be at odds with each other, it’s also been suggested that this isn’t really a problem, since different psychological achievements may deploy different forms of distributed cognition. And while one contributor was concerned that distributed cognition might not be able to explain the uniqueness of human beings, another was enthusiastic about the possibility of the approach revealing a deep continuity with the non-human animal world. Thoughts like these have been played out in relation to a range of historical phenomena. For example, we’ve had distributed takes on ancient technologies of writing and book publication, ancient wax writing tablets, the views held by the pneumatic physiologists of fifth century Greece, and the accounting practices of the Roman agronomists. Moreover, contributors have found instances of distributed cognition in a wide range of sociocultural phenomena, including music, dance, poetry and literature. All of this indicates exactly the kind of productive cross-fertilization between periods and disciplines at which the project is aiming. Thanks to everyone for their contributions so far.Michael Wheeler, University of Stirling (2015) This article was published on 2024-11-06