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This revolutionary book offers fresh answers
to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness.
Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience,
Terrence Deacon shows that:
- The evolution of language did not involve
a language organ or instinct, and did not result simply
from a larger, more complex brain.
- Language reflected a new mode of thinking:
symbolic thinking.
- Symbolic thinking triggered a co-evolutionary
exchange between languages and brains over two million
years of hominid evolution -- "Many of the physical
traits that distinguish human bodies and brains were ultimately
caused by ideas shared down the generations."
- The grammars of the world's languages
are remarkably similar and, despite their complexity,
are easily learned by young children, not because of innate
grammatical knowledge but because languages have themselves
evolved structural adaptations to human cognitive constraints,
particularly those of immature brains.
- The first symbolic communication evolved
as the only means our hominid ancestors had to overcome
the evolutionary difficulties of combining long-term sexual
exclusivity, mostly in pair bonds, with cooperative group
foraging, which became a critical factor with the utilization
of animal foods.
- The reorganization of the brain for language
brought with it many indirect and serendipitous consequences,
including unprecedented vocal control, unusual "innate"
calls like laughter and sobbing, a susceptibility to such
mental disorders as schizophrenia and autism, and a compulsion
to assign symbolic import to almost every aspect of the
physical world.
- An understanding of symbolic communication
allows us to reinterpret such aspects of consciousness
as rational intention, meaning, belief, and self-consciousness
as emergent properties of the virtual world created by
symbols. It also points the way to building machines that
don't just manipulate symbols, but understand them.
- Symbolic abilities created a species
that for the first time in the history of life had access
to others' thoughts and emotions -- and thus confronted
an ethical dimension to social behaviour.
Informing all these insights in a new understanding,
based on the author's own research and the latest findings
in the neurosciences and genetics, of how Darwinian processes
underlie the brain's development and function as well as
its evolution. On the road to explaining how this works,
Deacon introduces us to Hoover, the world's one and only
talking seal; Sherman and Austin, two chimpanzees struggling
with the counter-intuitive nature of symbols; and Kanzi,
another chimpanzee, who easily acquired advanced language
abilities as he observed his mother's failure to learn symbols.
In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience
that treats the brain as no more than a computer, Deacon
leads us on a carefully grounded neurobiological expedition
into a view of mind that does not reduce to soulless, clockwork
mechanism, but is instead an emergent feature of a universe
that is "nascent heart and mind." His book not
only provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism
of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the
experience of being human.
Terrence W. Deacon is a world-renowned
researcher in neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology.
He conducts research in laboratories at Boston University,
where he is associate professor of biological anthropology,
and at McLean Hospital at Harvard Medical School. In addition
to his research in brain evolution and development, he has
played a significant role in the innovation of neural transplantation
techniques for the treatment of human brain disorders. He
lives with his wife and two children in Concord, Massachusetts.
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