The mind's eye:

Linda S. Gottfredson, 2009:

"The obvious problem with my explanation, however, was that there was no sophisticated technology when humans evolved their big brains. Man had hardly any tools at all in the Pleistocene, except for fire and stones reshaped for scraping, cutting, and the like. I was close to abandoning my innovation-driven hazards hypothesis when I read the 1983 Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of the Mind by Lumsden and Wilson. It suggested that I had not been thinking elementally enough. Innovation and its hazards do not begin with technology but with the ‘‘mind’s eye.’’ This refers to man’s ability to lift his eyes beyond his immediate, concrete reality to imagine the possible and unseen. To imagine, which is the essence of both foresight and innovation. Innovation need only divert attention from the concrete here and now, which is where accidents are waiting to happen, to drive selection. As humankind pumped yet more novel hazards into its environment, it could have sped the evolution of its own intelligence. Prevention requires prediction, which in turn requires understanding cause-and-effect relations and probabilistic thinking. We do this all the time when driving. Should I stop talking on my cell phone while driving, or slow down in this rain, or keep a watch on the erratic driver in the next lane? Analogs among the presettlement Ache included stepping on snakes while hunting monkeys in the treetops, getting lost overnight in the forest without a firebrand, and being hit by a tree that someone else was cutting down."

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Linda S. Gottfredson, 2010:

"But something had to have selected for we human’s highly general ability to learn and reason, so I began searching for evidence and speculation about the earliest Homo sapiens and their environments. What about more basic hunting, gathering, and cooking technologies? A passage in The Promethean Fire (Lumsden & Wilson, 1983) made me realize, with a jolt, that I had falsely equated human innovation with physical technology. Innovation is more basic than that. It is simply having a mind’s eye: that is, being able to imagine something beyond what we are seeing, feeling, tasting or otherwise experiencing in the present moment; to imagine times, events, objects, beings, and circumstances that do not exist now and may never. To become tool makers and technologists we first had to become imaginators, to see beyond the concrete here and now. Recognizing hazards as potential threats to well-being is an act of imagination."