The story of how the human mind evolved and what happened once Homo sapiens learned to speak.
"A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, 'The accidental mind' shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of…
"A guide to the strange and often illogal world of neural function, 'The accidendal mind' shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of e…
This book encourages readers to view similarities and differences in various species as fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of nervous systems. "When did the first vertebrates emerge, and how did they differ from their invertebrate ancestors? When did vertebrates evolv…
"Much is conserved in vertebrate evolution, but significant changes in the nervous system occurred at the origin of vertebrates and in most of the major vertebrate lineages. This book examines these innovations and relates them to evolutionary changes in other organ systems, ani…
In "Evolutionary neuropsychology", Coolidge examines the evolutionary origins of the human brain. A new multidisciplinary science, evolutionary neuropsychology assumes that brain regions developed their functions in response to environmental challenges over billions of years. Th…
What makes human consciousness unique? John Parrington draws on early Russian ideas and the latest neuroscience to argue that humans went through a 'mind shift' when we developed language, and words and the shared cultural world they enabled altered our brains, and have shaped t…
"A proper lingua ex machina would be a language machine capable of nesting phrases and clauses inside one another, complete with evolutionary pedigree. Such circuitry for structured thought might also facilitate creative shaping up of quality (figuring out what to do with the le…