Nick Lewis: The Blog

By Jamie Talan | Psychology Today

Cave art is graphic and energetic, but its pictographs of animals and peopleare, in a word, primitive. Maybe, as anthropologists have surmised, the untrained artists simply couldn't draw more true-to-life representations. Now, though, a Harvard psychiatrist is offering another explanation. Stone Age people lived under such constant fear--of marauding animals, hostile tribes, even evil spirits--that it literally changed the way they saw their subjects, suggests Anneliese Pontius, M.D. To stay alert to danger, their brains worked faster, processing spatial information through a neural shortcut. [read full article]