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In general, an animal's brain size is in direct proportion to its body size, hence humans have bigger brains than other primates. The issue, however, is not the relativity of the brain sizes but how the anatomical areas of the brain, the cyto-architectonic areas connect with each other to carry out the specialized functions of the brain. This chapter discusses the physical differences between the human brain and the brain of chimpanzees and macaques. In addition to brain size, the neocortex size as well as the anatomy of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, and the Wernicke's and Broca's areas have also been examined to determine how the connectional fingerprints — or the connections between the functions of these anatomical areas — translate into functional fingerprints — or the response of the brain to different stimuli in different situations.

In this chapter we summarize an in depth analysis by two Bordeaux professors of enology of the methods that wine experts use to describe so many fragrances in wine. They studied the wine descriptions of thousands of wines by four wine experts to test the hypothesis that each used terms that might have some similar principles. The result was that they actually used a diversity of terms reflecting reflecting the distinct cognitive associations of each expert. The authors conclude that the main criterion for judging a wine for the experts was simple: was it “good” or not!

Positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, and other complementary techniques provide cognitive neuroscience a unique methodological array of functional neuroimaging instruments that make it possible to decipher the internal logic of the brain. Functional imaging is ideally suited to probe the neuronal correlates of language, depending on methodological and spatiotemporal constraints of the technique used. This chapter provides a methodological background of functional neuroimaging as well as its advantages and disadvantages when applied to cognitive research. It describes methodological limitations and caveats, along with the history of neuroimaging in language research. It then considers the logic of brain operations, core networks and recruited cortical fields in language generation, and whether cortical macro-networks in language include only Broca’s and Wernicke’s area.

One of the major adaptations of the temporal lobes is the storage and application of meanings to sounds. With the evolution of primates and later hominins, the temporal lobes became exapted for protolanguage and, later, fully modern recursive language. Language evolved through natural selection for communication. This chapter presents the hypothesis that a recent beneficent genetic event increased working memory and phonological storage capacity, allowing the release of recursive phrasing, a prerequisite for use of the subjunctive mode. The evolution of language may have been influenced by gossip, which served to keep cheaters in check in larger social groups. Freud proposed that jokes may have arisen to relieve aggressive and sexual tensions, and others have proposed that incongruent jokes may have emerged to reduce the probability of being surprised. The evolution of humor may be related to creativity; humor production and receptivity differences have been demonstrated in men and women, which may be correlated to mating strategies.

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.

The past 30 years has witnessed a debate between the holders of two very different views about how humans are able to talk. The behaviourists, following B. F. Skinner, argue that we learn to talk in the same way that we learn any other skill. Children are rewarded when they speak correctly, and reproved when they make mistakes. We can talk, whereas chimpanzees cannot, because we are better at learning: there is nothing special about language. In contrast, Noam Chomsky and his followers have argued that humans have a peculiar competence for language, which is not merely an aspect of their general intelligence. We learn to utter, and to understand, an indefinitely large number of grammatical sentences, and to avoid an even larger number of ungrammatical ones, so we cannot possibly learn which sentences are grammatical by trial and error. Instead, we must learn the rules that generate grammatical sentences. These rules are of great subtlety, so that, although we acquire and apply them, we cannot formulate them explicitly. For example, consider the two following sentences: How do you know who he saw? (1) Who do you know how he saw? (2) How do you know who he saw? Who do you know how he saw? Every speaker of English knows at once that is grammatical, and is not. But what rule tells us this? No-one but a trained linguist would have any idea, any more than a non-biologist would know how the rate of beating of the heart is adjusted to meet changing demands. In section 17.3, we describe a hypothesis about the rule that tells us that is ungrammatical: it is a subtle rule, but as yet no-one has thought up a simpler one. It is hard to believe that we could so painlessly master such rules unless we were genetically predisposed to do so. More generally, it is still beyond the wit of linguists and computer scientists to write a language-translating programme, yet many 5-year-olds know two languages, do not mix them up, and can translate from one to the other. A second reason for thinking that we cannot learn to talk by trial and error lies in the poverty of the input on which a child must rely. After hearing a finite set of utterances, a child learns to generate an indefinitely large number of grammatical sentences. This implies that the child learns rules, and not merely a set of sentences.

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.