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Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence

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Professors Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have put forth a strong body of work in support of why we humans have big brains and the implications for the future of our species, doing so in the context of anthropological and neuroscientific evidence.

As a neuroscience student who is interested in anthropology, it certainly was interesting to read of a species that had brains which were spectacularly larger than ours per body size. While explaining the development of brains in the context of evolution, Lynch & Granger make an effort to confront, as they refer to it, the ultimate "irresistable fallacy"-- that evolution favors us precisely because of our intelligence--strongly arguing why our intellectual capacity differs from other species (our big brains, as well as minute qualitative differences), and how this came about over millions of years. Lynch & Granger also portend, based on the tenets of their argument, what lies ahead for species with bigger brains--or in the case of the Boskops, what lies in the past.

This is a must read for anyone who believes they have evolution 'figured out', and/or for anthropological fans intrigued as to differences between primates based on neuroscientific knowledge.

Granger & Lynch are both accomplished neurobiologists, but they clearly didn't do their homework on evolutionary biology & evolutionary anthropology. How so? The "Boskop" race of humans that are a central point of discussion in this book only existed for about 40 years, after researchers started digging up ancient crania in South Africa, & before they started analyzing them with modern science. Google the topic, & you'll find that in the professional literature, the Boskops were dismissed as artifacts of shoddy scholarship over 50 years ago! To make a long story short, geological & archeological contextual affinities are a bit more important than similarities of morphology in identifying populations. Are Shaquille O'Neal & Yao Ming from the same population because they're both extremely tall? This is basically how the Boskops were created by early 20th century scientists...

The thesis at the heart of this book is highly questionable. Take a look at what paleoanthropologist John Hawkes' has to say:

"I hate to think that the theme of a 2008 book was pulled straight from a 1958 essay, but I don't know where else they would have gotten the idea. No anthropologists have written much about the so-called "Boskopoids" since 1958. There is no such thing as an "IQ estimate" for a fossil human; that's entirely nonsensical. There's no question that there have been massive cultural changes in the last 10,000 years. But the idea that our brains' functions have atrophied from some Pleistocene state has been left long behind in the dust of nineteenth-century race studies.
So I'm left wondering: Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple Google search to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?"

Based upon this, you've got to wonder...

[...]

Summary
Granger and Lynch have done an excellent job of explaining brain evolution; how the human brain evolved and adapted over millions of years. There are many theories out there of how our brains came to be and this summarizes the research very well. The book revolves around an interesting but controversial finding of a race of humans that had bigger brains than we did. Granger and Lynch manage to explain the controversy well and use this as a starting point to think about what it means to have bigger brains.

Audience
If you want to understand how brains evolved read this book. Don't let the controversies around the discoveries stop you. I have read many books on neuroscience and brain evolution and this book provides one of the best explanations of brain evolution.

Details
Granger and Lynch use the discovery of the Boksops, a race of humans that possibly had bigger brains then we do to explain how our brains evolved. They explain the controversies and background around the discovery and why it was shunned by the establishment. BUT this book is so much more than just about the boksops. The book delves into the meaning of bigger brains and the evolution of the brains from early mamals to homo sapiens and beyond. Granger and Lynch don't shy away from the controversy and provide new angles on the subject. This is a fascinating area of research and it adds a new dimension to how brains work. Don't let human-centric chauvinism distract you from understanding the human brain.

Take Aways
If you want to understand the brain more, what it means to have bigger brains and how it relates to intelligence, then pick up this book. I wish the book was marketed differently and it didn't emphasize the controversial finding of the Boksops, since it distracts from the fact that this is a great book on an important area of brain research. Granger and Lynch have done an excellent job of writing one of the best explanations of brain evolution and what it means to have big brains. Read, think and enjoy.

Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube

From neuroscience, evolutionary biology and genetics to history and anthropology to computing, this Big Brain: the origins and future of human intelligence by Gray Lynch and Richard Granger pulls together many diverse fields of knowledge to tackle the question of what makes the human brain and it's intelligence so different from any other animal, even our closest relatives. The book proves to be an informative read for anyone in any field of study. As a biology major currently taking a course in introductory neuroscience and have taken a course in evolutionary biology, I am of course a bit biased in saying that anyone will be able to understand the concepts presented since the majority are related to biology. But I can say that even with already being familiar with the most of the concepts, the book helped clarify and make more sense of what I am currently learning. I can also say that as someone who knows very little about computer science and how a computer works, the concepts presented that related to computing were very easy to understand. The authors' consistent use of analogies allows for understanding of unfamiliar fields.

The book opens with the discovery of the Boskop--a widely unknown extinct human relative that apparently had a brain 25 to 35 percent larger than that of human. The discovery posed the questions of if they had bigger brains and brain size directly correlates with new abilities, then why did Boskops not supercede humans and were they smarter than humans. These questions are left unanswered until the end of the book, and the authors move on to compare the brain circuits to a computing system posing the question of why machines cannot perform as human brains do.

The authors then go through the evolution of the brain from very early vertebrates to mammals explaining change in sensory systems that accompanied the evolution, but more importantly explaining the expansion of the mostly the cortex that accompanied the evolution into larger brains. Two types of organization in the brain--point to point and random access are involved in brain circuits. It is the random access circuits that allow for the expansion of the cortex and subcortical systems. The authors then move onto explain the feedback and hierarchy of cortical circuits in bigger brains and how they process information, specifically an image, and explain it is the multiple layers of processing that allows for complex thought processes.

Finally the authors speculate exactly how the big brain came to be. Throughout the book, the authors take on the stance that as humans who have higher intelligence than any other animal, we think that there was evolutionary pressure for us and for the organisms that let to our evolution to evolve better senses and more complex brains. Yet this is a trap we fall into, and in fact many traits that may seem superior just happened to occur because of chance. This is the case with the bigger brain. One of the only traits that actually correlates with big brains is larger size of babies at birth. Larger babies between species is just about the only thing consistently correlated with bigger brains. Larger babies are possible due to the lumbar region occupying a greater part of the trunk length. This larger lumbar region is due to the change to walking upright. So in conclusion bigger brains just happened due to the switch to walking upright.

For the majority of the book the authors have claimed that the large size of the human brain and the increased subcortical circuitry that accompanies it is responsible for intelligence, but they also pose there are some differences that could also be the culprit. These differences include a few different cell types, local circuits, different connectivity, and brain shape. In the end of the book the Boskop is revisited and their intelligence is speculated. The authors claim that the larger brain means more subcortical connections which simply means higher lever processing.

Immediately after finishing the book, it seems to deserve at least a four out of five star rating; the amount of information gained about what makes the human brain complex and about the evolution of larger brains is satisfying. The profound reasoning behind the speculation that human brains are bigger not due to selection pressure for more complex thought processes, but instead just because it happened covers up the fact that there are too many loose ends in the book. The number of questions unanswered or not given enough explanation is unsatisfying. For example, when the authors compare the brain to a computer and pose the question of why the machines cannot be built to accomplish the same mental abilities as human brains, they leave the question largely unanswered. Even in the case of the Boskop and the question of their superior intelligence and what this intelligence would mean, the answer is at most weak. The authors could have effectively left out the example of the Boskop instead of using it as a device to draw readers in and then briefly revisit it in the end only to disappoint with weak speculations as to their intelligence.

Introduction:

"Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence" by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger explores the evolution of the human brain and analyzes the skulls of early human relatives, such as the Boskops, to determine the implications of having a big brain. This review seeks to provide a synopsis of the book, as well as present an opinion on the arguments and writing style of the book. "Big Brain" is a thorough examination on how brains enlarge through evolution, and Lynch and Granger make their book easily accessible to a wide audience with their ability to weave together history, literature, and neuroscience.

Synopsis:

Lynch and Granger begin their analysis of brain evolution with the discovery of the Boskops, a distant relative of humans that shared the Earth with us almost 10,000 years ago. The discovery, although controversial, prompted a reassessment of the presumed "upward" trajectory of human evolution, since the fossil remains show them to be either direct ancestors or a related contemporaneous subspecies. Boskops possessed slim, human-like skeletons that allowed them to walk upright. However, their brain size is more than 30% larger than modern day humans, with a significant increase in the size of the prefrontal cortex, which experts believe contributed to substantial added intelligence. This discovery posed the question of whether bigger brains are better because they are correlated with added mental abilities, and if so, then what is it about the human brain that led to our dominance when the bigger brained Boskops became extinct.

In order to address these questions, the authors analyzed the evolution of the human brain from early vertebrates to mammals, with particular focus on the changes to the prefrontal cortex, which is closely linked to the highest cognitive functions. By analyzing the neurocircuitry of the brain, the authors can determine how the brain functions during thinking and show how high-level thought originates from simple biological machinery. The authors propose that most of the cortex is designed around the olfactory system of ancient vertebrates, and the organization of the early sensory systems has been adapted in to the brains of humans. Evolutionary changes in mammals lead to the expansion and elaboration of the visual and auditory systems and the sensory inputs became encoded in a random-access manner, which switched the brain processing from specialized midbrain areas to expanded cortical structures and allowed the brain to build multisensory unified representations of the world. Using this information, Lynch and Granger show what makes one brain different from another, and they make predictions about what the Boskops may have been like.


Review:

What appealed to me about "Big Brain" is that the authors presented both the scientific aim of understanding the brain as well as the engineering goal of actually building one. The book operates on the principle that to build brains you must really understand them, and to really understand brains, it is useful to attempt to construct them. The book focuses predominantly on the science behind understanding the architecture and function of the brain; however, they often include how the brain operates from an engineer's perspective. Although this is not always useful, and is sometimes distracting, it is especially useful in the section concerning the future implications of enhancing the brain and building artificial brains based on the function of both human and Boskop brains.

Throughout the book, the authors point out remaining controversies in the fields of neuroscience and anthropology that relate to the evolution of the brain. By presenting the facts that drive each of the different positions and providing support for each case, they are able to give the reader a better representation of the current state of knowledge and the direction in which future research is moving. This is seen in the authors' discussion of why Boskops are widely unknown, unlike our other hominid ancestors. Since Boskops possess huge brains and facial features that are not ape-like, they must be an anomaly because they do not fit into the idea of who our ancestors were. Lynch and Granger point out that assumptions like this are examples of "irresistible fallacy" in which we believe each feature or characteristic we possess must have been carefully selected for us. Instead, evolution occurs mainly by chance, so our high level of intelligence as humans and our large brain-to-body size ratio did not evolve due to selection pressure, but rather, they evolved due to random genetic changes that conferred some improved ability to procreate.

In the final chapter, the authors revisit the Boskops and attempt to answer the initial questions they posed. Lynch and Granger argue that the absolute size of the brain does not determine the intelligence of the species, but instead, the size of the brain in relation to the size of the body dictates relative intelligence. The differences in relative intelligence for different brain sizes results from the fact that larger brains contain more cortex than smaller brains, and a larger cortex is contains more association cortex responsible for higher-levels of thought. According to the authors, evolution initially selected an upright posture for our ancestors, and then much later bigger brains were selected. For this reason, Lynch and Granger correlate larger brain size and added intelligence to larger babies. An increase in the size of infants corresponds to an increase in the lumbar and pelvic regions, which are strongly influenced by adaptations in locomotor activity. Therefore, genetic changes arose in the way ancient hominids walked due to larger infants, and as a result, the size of the brains increased along with the relative intelligence of the Boskops. This theory proposed by the authors while intriguing, is subject to the "irresistible fallacy" they attempt to avoid throughout the book; however, skeletal remains are unable to provide evidence to either support or dispute their claims.

"Big Brain" poses many questions about how modern humans evolved and the disappearance of the Boskops, a seemingly superior species. Although the authors address and answer many of the questions they pose, many are left unanswered and most of those that are, remain purely speculative, particularly those regarding the fate of the Boskops. Their examination on the role of intelligence as a driver of human evolution provides valuable insight in to the evolution and adaptations of the brain while simultaneously cautioning the tendency to believe that our superior characteristics evolved because we find them important. The scientific fact and the neuroscience frame work of the book are solid and thorough. The sections on the Boskops are interesting and entertain the reader, but much of the conclusions drawn about them are speculative because only limited information can be derived from skeletal remains.

Review of Style and Structure:

This book is an informative and entertaining read; the authors' clear, concise writing style makes the book accessible to the layman. The authors do an excellent job of thoroughly explaining the different facets of neuroscience, and the evolution of big brains, without overloading the reader with difficult technical jargon. The authors' literary references, analogies, and the incorporation of illustrations further enhance the reader's understanding of the book. Lynch and Granger provide an all encompassing view of the past and future of human brains from the perspectives of multiple fields of study.

Although the book is well-written, the organization and structure of "Big Brain" occasionally distracts from the author's central focus, and at times, the chapters of the book do not transition well from one topic to the next. In the first chapter, the authors introduce the Boskops and pose many questions regarding their intelligence, brain function, and how they died out. However, it is not until the final chapters that the authors begin addressing these questions and propose several compelling arguments about the implications of having large brains. The majority of the book established the neuroscience framework upon which Lynch and Granger build their conclusions about whether bigger brains are better. They discuss the evolution and development of big brains by first analyzing the role of genes in evolution, and then investigating the machinery of brains and how it changes as they expand. In their investigation they provide an excellent investigation into neurocircuitry and comparative brain anatomy in mammals. They conclude the book with a discussion on how our brains render us human and how they might be changed in the future. Lynch and Granger introduce several compelling arguments including their comparison of brains and computers, but they have little or no relevance to the overall focus of the book, and this structure makes "Big Brain" slightly repetitive, particularly in the chapters discussing the Boskops.

Interesting Quotes:

They [Boskops] may have been among our direct ancestors, in which case we seem to have devolved to our current smaller brain size, or they may have been a related contemporaneous subspecies, our cousins; either way it is likely that their substantial brain size would confer substantial added intelligence. (9)

The switch from specialized midbrain apparatus to cortical modes of processing allowed the brain for the first time to build the multisensory unified representations of the external world. (85)

We propose, then, that the big brain arose from the big baby, and the big baby arose first from changes in walking, and then in enlarged hips in females. The proposal thoroughly contradicts the alternative assumption, that selection pressures for intelligence drove the evolution of big brains. (156)

These [brain size] measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors. (162)

Recommendation:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Big Brain", and found it to be an engaging read that offers fascinating insight into brain evolution and how it relates to intelligence. This fascinating book examines how big brains develop and combines a broad array of academic fields, including neuroscience, evolution, genetics, anthropology, computing and neurocircuitry to answer the question of why humans emerged as the dominant species in the modern world."Big Brain" appeals to all readers on some level and demonstrates how our brains came to be, as well as how they could be enhanced. Although the example of the Boskops and their significantly larger brains is controversial and disputed amongst experts, it is the most interesting and thought provoking argument of the book. It draws the reader in and causes them to question the presumed "upward" trajectory of human evolution and wonder how the human race is likely to proceed. I recommend this book to anyone interested in how brains function and the evolutionary development of the human brain. This book should be read from beginning to end; however, if the reader is only interested in the neuroscience and origins of intelligence, than I would suggest skipping the first and last couple of chapters with the authors' theories on the Boskops.

This is a good example of how far books about the brain intended for the layman have come in the 30 years since I was trained in neuroscience. Back then, there wasn't much, and what did exist was pretty dry and boring. There were exceptions, such as Richard Restak's early 80s book, The Brain (which Dr. Restak has followed with 17 other books about the brain), and R. L. Gregory's great little book on perception and the brain, Eye and Brain, which were very readable as well as doing a fine job of explaining the material.

Here Lynch and Granger have written an interesting and provocative book on the origin and possible direction of human intelligence. Trying to get a handle on human intelligence is in some ways easy--easy in the sense that an I.Q. test is quick and dirty, but hard in the sense that humans have hundreds of specialized abilities that aren't tested by intelligence tests. Using approaches that vary from molecular genetics to paleontology to modern cognitive science and neuroscience, the authors provide an eclectic analysis of what "big brains" and thinking are all about.

The authors propose the fascinating idea that the origin of big brains was actually an accidental mutation that, since it wasn't harmful and conferred advantages, has stayed in the human gene pool. The existence of the Boskop fossils with brain cases as large 1900 cc is cited as possibly an example of that. However, it's my understanding that the Boskop fossils have been disputed. Still, an interesting idea if true.

Unlike many neuroscience books out there intended for the layman, this isn't a general introduction to the brain; it's scope is much narrower, although you will certainly learn a lot about the brain along the way. Rather, it's a book on certain aspects of what brains can do and how they do it rather than a rigorous treatment of the neuroscience. If you're already well read in some of the neuroscience books out there intended for the non-specialist, you might want to try this as something different. If you're new to neuroscience, the book will be still be readable, but some basic understanding of the brain would help.

Such interesting topics as the comparative anatomy of the brain, language, memory, perception, cognition, artificial intelligence, genetics and the brain, normal brains and superbrains, get covered. Trying to write a book that ties so many diverse threads into one cloth isn't easy, but the authors are up to the task. Still, the book may seem scattered and almost too eclectic to some readers; but the brain is complicated enough and hard enough to understand so that you have to take your inspiration and insights whenever and wherever you can. This book does that quite well.

One cannot praise enough science writers that are both clear and profound, as the Authors of this brilliant essay are. They describe the evolution of our cognitive abilities, disoensing with the notion that intelligence was expecially selected for. But the most shocking discovery for me were the Boskops, those VERY big brained humans who may well have surpassed us in intelligence, but maybe with a childbirth death rate too high to survive. Think of what could have been!

As Gary Lynch and Richard Granger make perfectly clear in their book Big Brain, the size of the brain does not correlate directly with the intelligence of its owner. At least not in absolute terms. But still, they imply otherwise in relation to size of the brain of the "Boskop" race of extinct ancient humans. How did two distinguished researchers fall into this "fallacy"? We don't take for granted that a huge storeroom overflowing with ICs, heaps of electronic components and bundles of wires is more "intelligent" than the small PC on our desk, but our assumptions about the "perfect" products of the natural selection lead us the accept such fallacies in the realm of biology. Let's sum up what is known and accepted as proven and what might be considered reasonable arguments in this highly speculative intellectual endeavor.
* Size by itself doesn't correlate with intelligence, but the ratio of brain-size to body-size does. The received wisdom, that the large body requires large brain simply to sense and control all these muscles and biological housekeeping assets, is not convincing. Why do elephants need larger brains than the more agile, sensitive and continuously challenged mouse?
* Far more reasonable is the assumption that on average organisms gets as large a brain as they can support - even if they don't put the extra capacity to "useful" ends, like idly thinking why are they not smarter? Why? Probably because the neurons "colonize" the body for their own benefits, in a totally "selfish" manner (the homage to the idea of "selfish genes" is acknowledged) and their central colony known as "the Brain" will grow as outrageously large as the subject body can support (beyond this limit natural selection will annihilate the colonizers together with the "natives").
* Even within the boundaries of a "species" brain size doesn't mean much (except for pathological indications). Females, on average, are no less intelligent than the larger-brained males - and Einstein's superior brain-power was not reflected in its size or other well understood physical correlates.
* A baby is born with superfluous amount of neurons, interconnecting extensions and synapses. The most "genetic" form of learning is by trimming the unrequited and unused cross connection between parts that shouldn't communicate directly.
* Possible insight: An overly connected (and therefore large) brain might not be very intelligent.
* Hypothesis: the trimming of the neuron network in the human brain happens to be uniquely successful in promoting "structured thinking" (a better definition than intelligence) by generating a neural analog to the process of abstracting the flow of inputs from the senses into hierarchies of categories, as Lynch & Granger explain in length. There are no special types of neurons of categories, but the result of learning by trimming is a structure optimally supportive of this mode of thinking.
* Every creature learns its unique tricks of survival in the same general manner. The fly develops the proper coordination of wing muscles the same way a human baby learns to produce recognizable voices. And flying is no less demanding than producing verbal utterance. Just try to evade Mr. Obama's fast hand and you'll admire the capabilities of a fly's brain. The miracle of language is not the ability to modulate voice in a novel way, but in the cognitive process that map between internal representation of categories and standardized (within a community) set of aural symbols.
* Hypothesis: the essential requirement of language, the ability to represent objects, actions, processes and emotions as abstract symbols is derived from the well developed brain capability to form internal "nested" categories (the use of "object-oriented programming" paradigm is intended). And this capability is the direct consequence of a fortunate mutation in the gene (or a small set of interacting genes) that controls the trimming of the untrained neural network.
* So Chomsky's hypothesis regarding the physical existence of a "language organ" is not so weird. A part of the human brain is (by chance) trimmed perfectly to produce language just as a part of a fly brain is trimmed for flying. Neither needs a formal instruction to produce its miraculous behavior, nor a unique type of neurons. The uniqueness is in the structure of hierarchical sub nets, leftover from the trimming process (which is different from one part of the brain to another). As they say in the computer trade: "The Network is the Computer"
* Which brings me to speculate that language per se is not so human-exclusive. Using standardize language to communicate complex ideas from brain to brain is. When a cat sees a dog she (probably) thinks is a similar way to me seeing a lion: this is a dog. Dogs don't like cats. Dogs can be dangerous. Better to deter then risk an attack. Get into aggressive posture and be ready to escape. For us, humans, this internal monologue is processed by language, even when no external communication is required. The internal cat's language must be a lot more developed than her limited external communicative powers suggest.
* If so, what makes homo sapiens's language unique is the "externalization" of its full capabilities. The cat communicates a very small set of "primitive" categories, using a small set of common signals. The cat never felt the "urge" to develop a more sophisticated communication means, because cats don't have an urge to share their mysterious thoughts.
* Homo sapiens pushed the envelope of "proto language" to levels unseen before as a part of a novel social structure, based on their enhanced "intuitive psychologist" capability. Human excel (so we like to believe) at the art of understanding what goes on in other brains - we even continuously run internal, unspoken, scripts of dialogues with imaginary people not present.
* Spoken language is just the next - almost obvious - step up the ladder. Standardize the expression of the full range of internal categories and you gain the ability to communicate every idea that occupies your brain. The most suitable mechanism available to homo sapiens was the (relatively) new auditory apparatus that emerged in the windpipe after it took to walking upright.
* Another consequence of walking upright is the widening of the human pelvis, originally required to enable the vertical placement of the femur (thigh) bones under the center of gravity, is the ability to pass a rather large brain during birth - an opportunity the greedy neural community would not fail to exploit even before the drive for higher intelligence started to shape the human evolution.
* Walking upright doesn't require big brain. It's no more difficult than the aerobatics required to escape a charging falcon (a bird of small brain and supreme abilities). But a heavy head requires an upright posture in order to place the load on the spine rather than holding it extended horizontally by strong muscles. Therefore, the new way of walking had to precede enlargement of the brain. The unlikely pre-adaptation to big brains was successful, because it enabled the apes to find new niches, in the expanding savanna outside the diminishing rain forest, during the ecological changes of the time. The advantages of intelligence were not the drivers in this process.
* In the internal "Darwinian struggle" for survival amongst populations of different cell types, neurons are the clear winners. They hold every post of governance and control, totally directing the actions and inactions of the rest of the body. They managed this feat mainly because their network organization is so much more evolved than any other cell type. So they exclusively occupy they "executive suite on the top floor", a position that allows them access to disproportionate amount of energy, a unique "firewall" to block blood carried dangerous agents, and a strong bone cage against mechanical hazards.
* The "Parkinsonian" tendency of command centers to grow to the limit of the available resources is well documented in every type human organization. No reason to believe that it's different inside the human organism. The Boskops had large brains because they could feed enough neurons to fill the volume - but the oversized executive team was not very efficient, because its growth was not checked by competition between conflicting architectures. These architectures reflect alternative synapses trimming strategies, one of which produced the framework ideally suitable to categorical thinking.
* Categorical thinking led to language, and hence to better intergroup communications, teamwork and (sometimes) peaceful conflict resolution. We think, therefore we speak (well, most of us most of the time). Our brain is large, so we think a lot - also about subjects unrelated to survival. The Boskops had troubles thinking, because of the internal "noise" generated by all these useless synapses in their untrimmed brains. We became the winners because our brain is smartly groomed, every synapse tested before escaping the trimmer's merciless blade. It smaller but better suited to produce intelligence.

So, do I recommend Big Brain to the general reader? Definitely yes. Especially to the young ones eager to contest received wisdom, who might use its mind-opening text to enrich their creative thinking. Because we need a lot of creative minds to explore for breakthrough is the fascinating endeavor, to understand brain and mind.

The past few years have seen prodigious leaps forward in knowledge about our species. This book lays out the development of our brains, presents an exciting theory about how we grew those very special organs, and hints at our future. At first I skipped over the heavy duty explanation of how brains function, and went for the gossipy stuff. Then I went back and reread the science. I love this book; it captures my imagination and makes me think about evolutionary process.