Welcome

Cover of the book, (c) Gary Lynch and Richard Granger 2008, published by PALGRAVE MCMILLAN 2009

This blog is about the book "Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence" by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. It explores some questions about the book's claims, as well as asking some questions of its own.

Resources

• Gary Lynch podcast interview
• The book's website by the authors
• Chapter outline and notes
• Video of Terry McDermott and Gary Lynch on memory

This blog is intended to be a collaborative enterprise: if you know something please leave a comment or send an email.

Outline and Notes

This posting collects all the outline and notes postings in one place

Chapter	Outline	Notes
1: Big Brains, Bigger Brains	Outline	Notes
2: The Mind in the Machine	Outline	Notes
3: Genes Build Brains	Outline	Notes
4: Brains Arrive	Outline	Notes
5: The Brains of Mammals	Outline	Notes
6: From Olfaction to Cognition	Outline	Notes
7: The Thinking Brain	Outline	Notes
8: The Tools of Thought	Outline	Notes
9: From Brain Differences to Individual Differences	Outline	Notes
10: What's in a Species?	Outline	Notes
11: The Origins of Big Brains	Outline	Notes
12: Giant Brains	Outline	Notes
13: All But Human	Outline	Notes
14: More than Human	Outline	Notes

Notes on Chapter 14: More than Human

This chapter was largely about speculation: what cognitive abilities might Boskops have had?  Why did the Boskops die out?  What might the next steps in human intelligence be?

In the section "Brain and Superbrain" where the authors talk about why Boskops might have died out they raise the point again about how being super-intelligent is not that useful if you don't have a society to pass your insights on to.  While the average high school student may not be the equal of an Einstein in math, they do start out with knowledge gleaned from several thousand years of studying mathematics.

"The Final Path to Humans" points out that genetic control over brain structure is likely to be rather imprecise hence trying to engineer a human with superior cognitive abilities through genetics alone is liable to be very difficult.

The section, "Inconsistent Brain," talks about how Dmitry Belyaev domesticated foxes.  The reason I found this interesting it shows how simple breeding style genetics can result in behavioral changes.  Further investigation of exactly what produced a friendlier fox - was it a change in brain structure, hormones, something else - would be a fascinating study.

Chapter 14: More than Human

• Brain and Superbrain
• What abilities might a larger brain yield?
• Long paths: "Think it through"
• Being able to more fully explore the ramifications of a decision.
• Branching paths: "The continuity of self"
• Being able to recall the way that you were
• Example: when you were younger
• Stations at the ends of paths: "Phaedrus' knfie"
• Able to make very fine distinctions.
• (Why did the Boskops die out)
• Maybe they didn't want to spread like H. Sapiens
• Maybe they never reached a "critical population mass" where intelligence could have been more useful.
• New Paths, New Humans
• Speculation on how structural changes could have been triggered by minor gene changes.
• The Final Path to Humans
• Early mammals probably had brains that were focused on olfaction and audition.
• When mammals moved out of nocturnal niches, they had more brain development in the visual regions.
• Human beings are strongly auditory
• Human infants are more auditory than visual
• Audition would be useful to a language oriented species
• Neanderthals may have been more visual (larger anterior cortex)
• Genetic control of brain growth is very imprecise
• Stadium analogy
• Inconstant Brain
• Domestication of foxes
• Dmitry K. Belyaev's experiment in the 1950's
• Bred foxes for docility
• 30 to 35 generations
• Bred a group of foxes that were friendly to humans
• How were they different
• Physical
• Floppy ears
• Rolled up tail
• Coats of more than one color
• Mental/Chemical
• Higher levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin
• Brain - uknown
• Rat breeding in the 1930's
• Bred for maze running.
• Could achieve the same results with normal rats by putting them in a maze for a few weeks.
• Next Steps
• Asperger's high functioning group
• If they moved to an island
• Transhumanists - directed evolution
• Using drugs that enhance learning abilities
• Resurrect the Boskops --- using their DNA
• Coda
• Boskops may have died out because of infant and mother mortality
• Perhaps they were wiped out by more warlike humans
• Perhaps they still exist and just blend in with the rest of humanity
• Anecdote about Boskop grave

Notes on Chapter 13: All But Human

The big thing I got from this chapter was that there is more to support the notion that most of the differences between human and animal cognitive abilities stem from the size of the human brain as opposed to its quality.

The evidence cited for differences in human vs. animal brains seemed fairly slim by comparison - from a structural standpoint it does not sound like there is a whole lot of differences between human brains and other primates.  The differences in proteins also seems rather small.

One area that is completely ignored is that glia cells - the non-neuronal cells in the brain that perform functions such as immunity, neurotransmitter re-uptake and myelination.  The book The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science describes how these other cells, that outnumber neurons in the brain by more than 3 to 1, appear to do much more than simply provide support to neurons.  It would be interesting to learn whether human brains differ significantly from other mammals with respect to glial cells instead of focusing exclusively on neurons.

The part at the end of the chapter about Boskops seemed out of place with respect to what the rest of the chapter talked about.  Furthermore, the discussion does not mention Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons or other possible sub-species that might have had a larger brain size than modern humans: the discussion left me thinking that the authors considered Boskops to be another sub-species rather than statistical outliers.

The discussion about Boskops does give a very good reason for decreasing brain size, to whit that a larger brain at birth translates to a more difficult birthing process.  Given how dangerous childbirth is for modern women, a child with a 30% larger head would pose an even greater risk than existing babies.  The loss of a mother is especially bad because it means the loss of an established and valuable member of a society, making a community of large brained individuals even more difficult to support.

Chapter 13: All But Human

• Introduction
• Science is empirical: based on observation.
• It is difficult to "prove" that something is true, instead often times you eliminate alternatives.
• Well known facts can have exception: Newton vs. quantum physics.
• Are human beings intelligent because their brains are different from other animals or because the human brain is larger?
• Differences
• Most of the human brain is the same as other animals
• Cell Types
• Voon Economo neurons - only occur in humans gorillas chimps and bonobos.
• Occur in areas that are active during social interaction.
• Local Circuits
• Broca's and Wernicke's areas.
• "Double-wide" brain cells.
• Connectivity
• Our brains appear to form synapses more readily than other animals.
• Protein thrombospondin.
• Neurons have longer dendrites and have more synapses than apes.
• Human brain is 3 times the size of a chimp brain, but it does not have 3 times as many neurons.
• Recent Genes
• FOXP2
• 200,000 years old.  
• Appears to be language related.
• Microcephalin 
• 50,000 years old
• Regulates brain size
• ASPM
• 10,000 years old
• Involved with microcephaly - reduced brain size.
• Brain Shape
• Area 10
• Involved in higher brain functions.
• Could be larger than expected.
• Others claim it is the correct size for a 1350cc brain.
• From Quantity to Quality
• Where does language come from?
• Why do humans have it, but no other animal seems to?
• Some theorize that humans have a special language module in the brain.
• Others argue that it is size - human beings have much larger (400%) brains than chimps, etc.
• For the time being, neither argument can be conclusively proven as more likely.
• From Brain Advances to Cognitive Advances
• The gap
• Big brains arrive 100,000 years ago
• Real cultural changes start at roughly 20,000 years ago
• Why the gap?
• Critical mass theory
• A critical population is needed to create and pass on knowledge.
• From Cognition to Language
• Observation is that the cortex is already set up to reason in terms of grammars.
• Then the existing structures can be easily used to deal with languages.
• Rather than trying to create a new structure just to deal with language.
• Learning Curve
• There is a large gulf between human style communication (complex) 
• And animal style communication (relatively simple).
• Theory that as a cortical circuit is lengthened, the grammars it can recognize become more complex.
• From Speaking to Writing
• Written language skills are among the most difficult cognitive skills that humans display.
• Unlike spoken language, reading & writing cannot be expected to manifest spontaneously.
• Lack of evidence of reading & writing could have been because of a lack of population 
• 30,000 years ago Europe had a population of around 5,000.
• Why did the Boskops die out?
• Massive difficulty with childbirth (larger heads).
• Means a smaller population
• Smaller population means no critical mass.
  

Notes on Chapter 12: Giant Brains

Ideally, this chapter explains why the Boskop find was forgotten. In the first couple of sections, the authors talk about how the find was viewed by prominent scientists and how there were multiple finds that corroborated each other.

The section, "How Giant Brains were Forgotten," goes into the Piltdown fraud.  The authors argue that the fraud tainted subsequent finds by British paleontologists and that the Boskop discovery fell victim to this.  A secondary reason for the find being forgotten is the "irresistible fallacy" that human beings are the apex of evolution, that evolution leads inexorably towards intelligence and that therefore no prehistori

Preview

c species could have been more intelligent than humans.

The authors spend the rest of the chapter speculating about how Boskops could have been more intelligent and the nature of intelligence itself.

According to the authors, their intention was not to try and cast the Boskop find as an indication of a separate race.  To quote the above link:  It is not possible to read Big Brain and conclude that the authors believe in any way in this notional “Boskop race”, nor that we have in any way somehow mistakenly adopted decades-old, long-rejected interpretations of these skulls.

The problem I had with this was that I did get the impression  that the authors were trying to argue in favor of the notion that the South African find was indicative of a "Boskop Race."  Whether my impression is unique or not is something that you will have to figure out by reading the book on your own.