TED Books

"Connecting the concept of tiger with the concepts of watering hole and sundown would have been a further, useful self-teaching device 100,000 years ago. Learning to convey to another person the notion of "tiger" through the use of gestures and audible utterances, perhaps picking up a stick to make a sketch of a sabertooth in the sand, not only multiplied the power of conceptual abstraction by attaching this mode of thought to a mode of communication, it introduced a powerful way to build mind-tools — abstracting abstraction. The idea of a tiger is represented conceptually in an individual mind, then abstracted to another level of symbolization by associating the concept with a human utterance. "

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