Review by Booklist Review
"Evolution is a game of chance, not strategy," neuroscientist Jebelli reminds us. Yet the brains of Homo sapiens have certainly hit the natural-selection jackpot. Employing neuroanatomy and neurobiology, anthropology, and the interplay between genetics and environment, Jebelli investigates early human brains and their hard-wiring, higher cognition, and the possibilities for future brain evolution and enhancements. Throughout human evolution, the brain has changed not just physically in size and organization but also in memory capacity, intelligence, language, emotions, creativity, and social behavior. Fascinating morsels, including the "warrior gene" MAOA, neural circuits for survival, and metacognition, and interesting people, among them feral children, split-brain patients, and those afflicted with alexithymia (difficulty feeling emotions), deepen the discussion. Compassion apparently produces such evolutionary perks as cooperation, reciprocity, forgiveness, altruism, and cleverness. Intelligence can be influenced by environmental factors, including education, nutrition, and health. But the existence of consciousness, that mind-bending sense of self, continues to perplex neuroscientists, philosophers, and theologians. Jebelli ably demonstrates just how successful evolution's experiments with the human brain have been while it remains a wondrous work-in-progress.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Neuroscientist Jebelli (In Pursuit of Memory) ranges a bit too wide in this history of the human mind. In exploring the question of "why have we ended up with the brains we have," Jebelli draws on philosophy, theology, and literature and considers empathy, consciousness, and depression. He offers up science's take on free will ("You have free will, you just don't have conscious will"), memory (evolutionarily traced back to "remembering predators and the location of food sources"), language acquisition (which began around 500,000 years ago, when "brain size ballooned in humans"), and artificial intelligence (some neuroscientists posit it may evolve in a way similar to the human brain). While he argues effectively that "to study the brain is to study the essence of what makes us human," his frequent jumps in topic and timeline distract, and his most provocative claims--"Were we to understand the brain better than we currently do, we could predict a person's future behaviour with astonishing accuracy," and "Our autistic ancestors probably played a fundamental role in shaping early human societies due to their unique strengths and special abilities"--are presented without enough supporting evidence. This one doesn't quite come together. (July)
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