Harmony, Perspective, and Triadic Cognition

Norman D. Cook has authored three books on human psychology, Stability and Flexibility (1980), The Brain Code (1986) and Tone of Voice and Mind (2002). He has also published articles in numerous journals, including Nature, Perception, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Brain, American Scientist, Behavioral Science, Empirical Aesthetics, Music Perception, Spatial Vision, Cognitive Science, Brain and Language, Brain and Cognition, Consciousness and Cognition and Neuroscience. He is currently a professor of cognitive psychology at Kansai University, Osaka.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Human hearing: harmony; 3. Human seeing: perspective; 4. Human work: tools and handedness; 5. Human communication: language; 6. Consciousness; 7. Loose ends; 8. Conclusion.

'Cook's unique thesis is that the human mind emerged from two related evolutionary changes: triadic sensory processing and cerebral laterality. In making stone tools, our early ancestors learned how to handle visual, auditory and touch information simultaneously in posterior association cortex. But, in making tools they were obliged to train one hand (hemisphere) to be the motor executive. Precisely because the other 'non-dominant' hemisphere was not an executive, it developed its own talents for various types of configurational processing: face recognition, harmony perception, language prosody and other holistic processes not requiring executive control.' Theodor Landis, Université de Genève