Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

by E Fuller Torrey

  13.   Tobias, “The Brain of Homo habilis.”

  14.   R. E. Jung and R. J. Haier, “The Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) of Intelligence: Converging Neuroimaging Evidence,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (2007): 135–187. See also J. Gläscher, D. Tranel, L. K. Paul et al., “Lesion Mapping of Cognitive Abilities Linked to Intelligence,” Neuron 61 (2009): 681–691; J. Gläscher, D. Rudrauf, R. Colom et al., “Distributed Neural System for General Intelligence Revealed by Lesion Mapping,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107 (2010): 4705–4709; and A. K. Barbey, R. Colom, J. Solomon et al., “An Integrative Architecture for General Intelligence and Executive Function Revealed by Lesion Mapping,” Brain 135 (2012): 1154–1164.

  15.   Jung and Haier, “The Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory.”

  16.   Preuss, “The Human Brain”; M. L. McKinney, “Evolving Behavioral Complexity by Extending Development,” in Biology, Brains, and Behavior: The Evolution of Human Development, ed. Sue Taylor Parker, Jonas Langer, and Michael L. McKinney (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2000), 25–40, at 32; John C. Eccles, Evolution of the Brain (New York: Routledge, 1989), 42; Richard E. Passingham, The Human Primate (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), 83; P. T. Schoenemann, “Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the Human Brain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 379–406.

  17.   K. Semendeferi, K. Teffer, D. P. Buxhoeveden et al., “Spatial Organization of Neurons in the Frontal Pole Sets Humans Apart from Great Apes,” Cerebral Cortex 21 (2011): 1485–1497; S. Bludau, S. B. Eickhoff, H. Mohlberg et al., “Cytoarchitecture, Probability Maps and Functions of the Human Frontal Pole,” NeuroImage 93 (2014): 260–275; K. Semendeferi, E. Armstrong, A. Schleicher et al., “Prefrontal Cortex in Humans and Apes: A Comparative Study of Area 10,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114 (2001): 224–241; R. Muhammad, J. D. Wallis, and E. K. Miller, “A Comparison of Abstract Rules in the Prefrontal Cortex, Premotor Cortex, Inferior Temporal Cortex, and Striatum,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2006): 974–989; P. J. Brasted and S. P. Wise, “Comparison of Learning-Related Neuronal Activity in the Dorsal Premotor Cortex and Striatum,” European Journal of Neuroscience 19 (2004): 721–740; J. M. Fuster, “Frontal Lobe and Cognitive Development,” Journal of Neurocytology 31 (2002): 373–385; J. Jonides, E. E. Smith, R. A. Koeppe et al., “Spatial Working Memory in Humans as Revealed by PET (Letter),” Nature 363 (1993): 623–625.

  18.   A. E. Cavanna and M. R. Trimble, “The Precuneus: A Review of Its Functional Anatomy and Behavioural Correlates,” Brain 129 (2006): 564–583; Witelson et al., “The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein”; W. Men, D. Falk, T. Sun et al., “The Corpus Callosum of Albert Einstein’s Brain: Another Clue to His High Intelligence?,” Brain 137 (2014): pt. 4, p. e268 (letter).

  19.   N. Makris, D. N. Kennedy, S. McInerney et al., “Segmentation of Subcomponents Within the Superior Longitudinal Fascicle in Humans: A Quantitative, In Vivo, DT-MRI Study,” Cerebral Cortex 15 (2005): 854–869; T. Sakai, A. Mikami, M. Tomonaga et al., “Differential Prefrontal White Matter Development in Chimpanzees and Humans,” Current Biology 21 (2011): 1397–1402; J. S. Schneiderman, M. S. Buchsbaum, M. M. Haznedar et al., “Diffusion Tensor Anistrophy in Adolescents and Adults,” Neuropsychobiology 55 (2007): 96–111; J. Zhang, A. Evans, L. Hermoye et al., “Evidence of Slow Maturation of the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus in Early Childhood by Diffusion Tensor Imaging,” NeuroImage 38 (2007): 239–247; G. Roth and U. Dicke, “Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence,” Trends in Cognitive Science 29 (2005): 250–257.

  20.   Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 194. Striedter in Principles of Brain Evolution states it as follows: “As [brain] regions become disproportionately large, they tend to ‘invade’ regions that they did not innervate ancestrally” (11); P. V. Tobias, “Recent Advances in the Evolution of the Hominids with Special Reference to Brain and Speech,” in Recent Advances in the Evolution of Primates, ed. Carlos Chagas (Vatican City: Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarum Scripta Varia 50, 1983), 85–140. Tobias was quoting N. Geschwind, “Disconnexion Syndromes in Animals and Nan,” Brain 88 (1965): 237–294, and N. W. Ingalls, “The Parietal Region in the Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 24 (1914): 291–341. See also MacDonald Critchley, The Parietal Lobes (New York: Hafner, 1969), 16; M.-M. Mesulam, “A Cortical Network for Directed Attention and Unilateral Neglect,” Annals of Neurology 10 (1981): 309–325; and Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution, 327. The inferior parietal lobule consists of areas 39 and 40 in the Brodmann system of classification.

  21.   R. I. M. Dunbar, “The Social Brain Hypothesis and Its Implications for Social Evolution,” Annals of Human Biology 36 (2009): 562–572; M. Balter, “Why Are Our Brains So Big?,” Science 338 (2012): 33–34.

  2. HOMO ERECTUS

    1.   F. Spoor, M. G. Leakey, P. N. Gathogo et al., “Implications of New Early Homo Fossils from Ileret, East of Lake Turkana, Kenya (Letter),” Nature 448 (2007): 688–691; J. N. Wilford, “New Fossils Indicate Early Branching of Human Family Tree,” New York Times, August 9, 2012. We know remarkably little about which species evolved from which, since we still have so few fossils. Archeologists argue endlessly about such issues, but it is like arguing about what a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle will look like when only twenty-seven of the pieces are yet available.

    2.   Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 69–70.

    3.   Kenneth L. Feder, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human History (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2000), 120–121. The stone tools of Homo erectus are usually classified as Acheulean, in contrast to the Oldowan (named after Olduvai Gorge) tools of Homo habilis. It should be pointed out that, although we call the tools “handaxes,” we really do not know how they were used. See R. G. Klein, “Archeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (2000): 17–36.

    4.   Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 151; Z. Zorich, “The First Spears,” Archaeology, March–April 2013, 16; M. Balter, “The Killing Ground,” Science 344 (2014): 1080–1083.

    5.   A. Gibbons, “Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Help Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain,” Science 316 (2007): 1558–1560; J. Gorman, “Chimps Would Cook If Given Chance, Research Says,” New York Times, June 3, 2015. See also Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic, 2009).

    6.   See, for example, Terrence C. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

    7.   Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 112.

    8.   M. Lewis, “Myself and Me,” in Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives, ed. Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell, and Maria L. Boccia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20–34.

    9.   B. Amsterdam, “Mirror Self-Image Reactions Before Age Two,” Developmental Psychobiology 5 (1972): 297–305.

  10.   J. R. Anderson, “To See Ourselves as Others See Us: A Response to Mitchell,” New Ideas in Psychology 11 (1993): 339–346; J. R. Anderson, “The Development of Self-Recognition: A Review,” Developmental Psychobiology 17 (1984): 37–49; M. Lewis and J. Brooks-Gunn, “Toward a Theory of Social Cognition: The Development of Self,” in Social Interaction and Communication During Infancy, ed. Ina C. Užgiris (Washington, DC: Jossey-Bass, 1979), 1–20; L. Mans, D. Cicchetti, and L. A. Sroufe, “Mirror Reactions of Down’s Syndrome Infants and Toddlers: Cognitive Underpinnings of Self-Recognition,” Child Development 49 (1978): 1247–1250; G. Dawson and F. C. McKissick, �
�Self-Recognition in Autistic Children,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 14 (1984): 383–394; C. J. Neuman and S. D. Hill, “Self-Recognition and Stimulus Preference in Autistic Children,” Developmental Psychobiology 11 (1978): 571–578.

  11.   A. D. Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now? The Anterior Insula and Human Awareness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (2009): 59–70; Antonio Damasio, “The Person Within,” Nature 423 (2003): 227; A. D. Craig, “The Sentient Self,” Brain Structure and Function 214 (2010): 563–577; G. Gallup, “Self-Awareness and the Emergence of Mind in Primates,” American Journal of Primatology 2 (1982): 237–248.

  12.   S. D. Hill and C. Tomlin, “Self-Recognition in Retarded Children,” Child Development 52 (1981): 145–150; T. F. Pechacek, K. F. Bell, C. C. Cleland et al., “Self-Recognition in Profoundly Retarded Males,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 1 (1973): 328–330; L. P. Harris, “Self-Recognition Among Institutionalized Profoundly Retarded Males: A Replication,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 9 (1977): 43–44.

  13.   E. F. Torrey, “Schizophrenia and the Inferior Parietal Lobule,” Schizophrenia Research 97 (2007): 215–225; D. Simeon, O. Guralnik, E. A. Hazlett et al., “Feeling Unreal: A PET Study of Depersonalization Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (2000): 1782–1788; F. Biringer, J. R. Anderson, and D. Strubel, “Self-Recognition in Senile Dementia,” Experimental Aging Research 14 (1988): 177–180; F. Biringer and J. R. Anderson, “Self-Recognition in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Mirror and Video Study,” Journal of Gerontology 47 (1992): P385–P388; E. H. Rubin, W. C. Drevets, and W. J. Burke, “The Nature of Psychotic Symptoms in Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type,” Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology 1 (1988): 16–20; Todd E. Feinberg, Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 73; L. K. Gluckman, “A Case of Capgras Syndrome,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2 (1968): 39–43.

  14.   G. G. Gallup Jr., “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition,” Science 167 (1970): 86–87.

  15.   Gerhard Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds (New York: Springer, 2013), 210; H. L. W. Miles, “Me Chantek: The Development of Self-Awareness in a Signing Orangutan,” in Parker, Mitchell, and Boccia, Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, 254–272; Michael Lewis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Social Cognition and the Acquisition of Self (New York: Plenum, 1979), 182.

  16.   H. Prior, A. Schwarz, and O. Güntürkün, “Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition,” PLoS Biology 6 (2008): e202; J. M. Plotnik, F. B. M. de Waal, and D. Reiss, “Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103 (2006): 17063–17057; D. Reiss and L. Marino, “Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98 (2001): 5937–5942; Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye: Social Intelligence in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 84.

  17.   Roth, The Long Evolution of Brains and Minds, 210; C. W. Hyatt and W. D. Hopkins, “Self-Awareness in Bonobos and Chimpanzees: A Comparative Perspective,” in Parker, Mitchell, and Boccia, Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, 248–253; Miles, “Me Chantek”; F. B. M. de Waal, M. Dindo, A. Freeman et al., “The Monkey in the Mirror: Hardly a Stranger,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102 (2005): 11140–11147. Self-awareness may have evolved independently several times. Such things happen in evolution; for example, it has been said that the eye evolved independently at least 40 times in human evolution. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 349; Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 589; E. Pennisi, “Mining the Molecules That Made Our Mind, Science 313 (2006): 1908–1911; H. E. Hoekstra and T. Price, “Parallel Evolution Is in the Genes,” Science 303 (2004): 1779–1781; M. R. Leary and N. R. Buttermore, “The Evolution of the Human Self: Tracing the Natural History of Self-Awareness,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33 (2003): 365–404 (see also Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science [London: Thames and Hudson, 1996] for a similar formulation); Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar, The Dawn of Human Culture: A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the “Big Bang” of Human Consciousness (New York: Wiley, 2002), 8; John Hawks, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran et al., “Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104 (2007): 20753–20758; see also Patrick Evans, Sandra L. Gilbert, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” Science 309 (2005): 1717–1720.

  18.   S. T. Parker, “A Social Selection Model for the Evolution and Adaptive Significance of Self-Conscious Emotions,” in Self-Awareness: Its Nature and Development, ed. Michael Ferrari and Robert J. Sternberg (New York: Guilford, 1998), 108–136; Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 48; Raymond Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 220–221.

  19.   Feder, The Past in Perspective, 106; Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 113. For a similar analysis of one of the most recently found Homo erectus skulls, see X. Wu, L. A. Schepartz, and W. Liu, “A New Homo erectus (Zhoukoudian V) Brain Endocast from China,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277 (2009): 337–344; Coolidge and Wynn, The Rise of Homo Sapiens, 114.

  20.   John S. Allen, The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98; Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now?”

  21.   C. Lebel, L. Walker, A. Leemans et al., “Microstructural Maturation of the Human Brain from Childhood to Adulthood,” NeuroImage 40 (2008).

  22.   D. T. Stuss, “Disturbance of Self-Awareness After Frontal System Damage,” in Awareness of Deficit After Brain Injury: Clinical and Theoretical Issues, ed. George P. Prigatano and Daniel L. Schacter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 63–83, 65, 68; K. P. Wylie and J. R. Tregallas, “The Role of the Insula in Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Research 123 (2010): 93–104; Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now?”

  23.   K. Zilles, “Architecture of the Human Cerebral Cortex,” in The Human Nervous System, ed. George Paxinos and Juergen K. Mai, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 997–1042. Inferior parietal lobule function is, in fact, extraordinarily complex and diverse. For older reviews, see MacDonald Critchley, The Parietal Lobes (New York: Hafner, 1969); and D. Denny-Brown and R. A. Chambers, “The Parietal Lobe and Behavior,” in The Brain and Human Behavior, ed. Harry C. Solomon, Stanley Cobb, and Wilder Penfield (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1958), 35–117.

  24.   T. W. Kjaer, M. Nowak, and H. C. Lou, “Reflective Self-Awareness and Conscious States: PET Evidence for a Common Midline Parietofrontal Core,” NeuroImage 17 (2002): 1080–1086; P. Ruby and J. Decety, “Effect of Subjective Perspective Taking During Simulation of Action: A PET Investigation of Agency,” Nature Neuroscience 4 (2001): 546–550; L. Q. Uddin, J. T. Kaplan, I. Molnar-Szakacs et al., “Self-Face Recognition Activates a Frontoparietal ‘Mirror’ Network in the Right Hemisphere: An Event-Related fMRI Study,” NeuroImage 25 (2005): 926–935; H. C. Lou, B. Luber, M. Crupain et al., “Parietal Cortex and Representation of the Mental Self,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 101 (2004): 6827–6832; S. M. Platek, J. W. Loughead, R. C. Gur et al., “Neural Substrates for Functionally Discriminating Self-Face from Personally Familiar Faces,” Human Brain Mapping 27 (2006): 91–98; Simeon et al., “Feeling Unreal.”

  25.   C. Butti, M. Santos, N. Uppal et al., “Von Economo Neurons: Clinical and Evolutionary Perspectives,” Cortex 49 (2013): 312–326; J. M. Allman, N. A. Tetreault, A. Y. Hakeem et al., “The Von Economo Neurons in Frontoinsular and Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Great Apes and Humans,” Brain Structur
e and Function 214 (2010): 495–517.

  26.   F. Cauda, G. C. Geminiani, and A. Vercelli, “Evolutionary Appearance of Von Economo’s Neurons in the Mammalian Cerebral Cortex,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 104; C. Fajardo, M. I. Escobar, E. Buriticá et al., “Von Economo Neurons Are Present in the Dorsolateral (Dysgranular) Prefrontal Cortex of Humans,” Neuroscience Letters 435 (2008): 215–218; C. Butti, C. C. Sherwood, A. Y. Hakeem et al., “Total Number and Volume of Von Economo Neurons in the Cerebral Cortex of Cetaceans,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 515 (2009): 243–259; Allman et al., “The Von Economo Neurons.”

  27.   V. E. Sturm, H. J. Rosen, S. Allison et al., “Self-Conscious Emotion Deficits in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration,” Brain 129 (2006): 2508–2516; W. W. Seeley, D. A. Carlin, J. M. Allman et al., “Early Frontotemporal Dementia Targets Neurons Unique to Apes and Humans, Annals of Neurology 60 (2006): 660–667.

  28.   Allman et al., “The Von Economo Neurons”; J. Allman, Atiya Hakeem, and K. Watson, “Two Phylogenetic Specializations in the Human Brain,” Neuroscientist 8 (2002): 335–346; J. M. Allman, N. A. Tetreault, A. Y. Hakeem et al., “The Von Economo Neurons in the Frontoinsular and Anterior Cingulate Cortex,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1225 (2011): 59–71.