Advanced Human Cognition: A Faustian Deal

Abstract

As stated earlier in this book, in seeking to determine how we became human, our search would benefit from an initial focus on those rather few characteristics that appear to be uniquely and quintessentially human. Preoccupied with inconclusive word games, the social sciences have not produced much sound empirical data. Neuroscience, on the other hand, has, but that wealth remains largely untapped by those examining hominin cognitive evolution. For instance, one of the major differences between humans and other extant primates is found in Brodmann’s area 10 (Brodmann 1912) in the prefrontal lobe (Fig. 7.1), apparently much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees (Semendeferi 2001; Diller et al. 2002). This cortical region supports higher cognitive functions, including the extraction of meaning from experience; the organization of mental contents that control creative thinking and language; artistic creation; initiation of expression of and planning for future action (Damasio 1985). Hodgson and Helvenston (2006) suggest that area 10 is one of the most likely substrates for the expansion of complex, sustained, and focused human consciousness, which is one of the major differences between humans and other extant primates. Details of their neurological disparities suggest that distinctive changes must have taken place during the course of hominin evolution, since the phylogenetic split in the Miocene period.