Magical Thought Theory: An Architecture of Symbolic Technology in Human Cognition

Magical Thought Theory proposes a formal model of human symbolic cognition in which art and ritual function as the first symbolic technologies. The theory identifies extraction—the isolation and redeployment of portable mechanisms from embodied experience, enabled by magical thought and analogical reasoning, as the key cognitive process underlying symbolic creation, transmission, and stabilization. Integrating developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence, the model explains both the emergence of symbolic culture and its punctuated evolutionary progression.