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Why The Big Brain? - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The posterior region is connected to cortical areas with known visuospatial functions,
      - involved in spatial attention and memory, eye movements, and mental navigation
    - - TH and TF, are found uniquely in primates
      - increased memory abilities
    - - allows tracking of social situation
  - - - Acts of deception involve other primates as objects to be manipulated, these animals have long memories and ability to retaliate, therefore deception must be more complex to be successful
      - learnable in social environments
      - based on brain size
      - terrestrial habitats
      - large populations communally living
  - - - functions
        
        Working memory and mental rehearsal
        
        language function
        
        Spatial and episodic memory
        
        event prediction
        
        empsthy
        
        imitation
        
        Non-motor associative learning
        
        planning
        
        motor control
      - cerebellum size correlates more strongly with foraging skill
      - cerebellum and cortico-cerebellar networks are key components enabling the control,organization and comprehension of complex sequences such as language
    - - function
        
        episodic memory
        
        Touch sensation
        
        language processing
        
        essentially higher functioning thought
      - neocortex size correlated with sociality
  - - - The capacity to infer the social purpose of the behaviours of other persons or the self
    - - copying the form of another
      - action based
      - over imitation
        
        copy all, refine later
    - - learning from the results of what the subject does
      - goal based
    - - interactants are mutually responsive to one another
      - shared goal by all to act together
      - coordination of plans and intentions with understanding of roles
  - - - respiratory
        
        lungs
        
        diaphragm
      - phonatory
        
        larynx
        
        vocal chords
      - resonatory
        
        nasal cavities
      - articulatory
        
        tongue
        
        teeth
        
        lips
      - control sound of communication
    - - auditory area
        
        wernikies area
        
        brocas area
        
        motor area
        
        sensory information for speech producton
        
        formulation of responce
        
        comprehension of speech
        
        processing of sounds from ears
    - - highly conserved protein sequences in vertebrates
      - development of circuits involving the neocortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum
      - role in not only vocal learning, but also fine motor contro
      - Human variant of FOXP2 causes alteration in brain development
        
        synaptic plasticity, axon and dendrite outgrowth, and activity in medium spiny neurons of the striatum
    - - FLB
        
        physical production and creation of speech
      - FLN
        
        figurative understandng and idea generation for speech
        
        recursion
        
        discrete infinity
  - - - Recognize that all people act on the basis of mental states or propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.)
      - Attribute mental states or attitudes to oneself and to others
      - Understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions different from one’s own
    - - 0-12 months
        
        mimicking of emotions
        
        empathy
        
        passive immitation
        
        gaze processing
        
        joint attention
      - 15-24 months
        
        Sensitivity to others’ intentions
        
        Language development
        
        Full understanding of joint attention
        
        Deliberate imitation
        
        pretend play
      - 3-4 years
        
        Distinction between mental and physical
        
        Psychological causality
        
        Understand beliefs and desires
        
        Distinguish between direct experience and being told
    - - a robust and replicable response to stories that do require belief attribution
      - significantly lower response to closely matched control stories that only require representing non-mental representations
      - no difference among non-mental stories that do or do not demand meta-representation
      - Right temporoparietal junction
        
        shift attention to unexpected stimuli
        
        understands other peoples perspective
        
        connected to voice processing
  - - - capacity to generate, and to reason with, novel suppositions or imaginary scenarios
      - occurence of creativity 20000 years after migration event of homo sapiens across the globe
        
        simultaneous occurrence in every group of homo sapiens
        
        found in art and figurative items across the world
      - pretend play
        
        only occurs in humans
        
        think and act within the scope of an original supposition or one learned from observation
        
        vital in brainstorming and speculative thinking
      - The Joycean Machine
        
        mental operating machine hypothesis
        
        the stream of inner verbalization and imagery which radically altered the computational powers of the human brain
        
        gave rise to the indefinite flexibility and creativity of modern human intelligence
        
        issues
        
        Children do not appear to have self talk until later in development, after the appearance of pretend play
        
        not sufficient to explain the evolution of human creativity
        
        does explain importance of language developement
      - Protean cognition
        
        Random displays of human creative thought are honest displays of fitness –and thus sexually selected
        
        sexually driven hypothesis to human cognition increase
        
        human capacities for fine culture and art can be explained with sexual selection
      - cognitive elements
        
        supposition generator
        
        Experiential imagination
        
        imagery
        
        perception
        
        propositional imagination
        
        language
        
        possible worlds generator
        
        memory systems
    - - definition
        
        Phenotypic variation that results from information transmitted across generations through social learning
      - criteria
        
        expression of trait must result from social learning
        
        Variation in information must be transmitted across generations
        
        Social learning must modify the phenotype of the learning individual for sufficient time in order to allow other individuals to observe the behavior and learn it
        
        modification of the phenotype must generalize to similar situations (interprative)
      - increases social and overall fitness
      - benefits
        
        More adaptive knowledge supports a larger carrying capacity
        
        more innovation
        
        promotes social learning in larger groups
        
        social cohesion
        
        Social learners can acquire more adaptive knowledge at a lower cost of individual and group
        
        Larger groups with more adaptive knowledge create a selection pressure for an extended juvenile period
        
        creates more knowledgeable youth
      - cultural brain hypothesis
        
        adaptive knowledge
        
        primary pressure for large brains across many taxa
        
        locally adaptive information plausibly related to solving problems such as finding and processing food
        
        necessary for longterm survival of a large group
        
        cumulative cultural brain hypothesis
        
        human pathway
        
        autocatalytic improvement of brain size and complexity
        
        prerequisites
        
        High transmission fidelity
        
        Smart ancestors
        
        Sociality
        
        Mating structure, low reproductive skew
        
        leads to
        
        innovation
        
        often realistically led by groups of people working on same things
        
        often falsely marked by an individuals accomplishments
        
        collaborative by nature
        
        often arise through mistakes or random luck
        
        rate of innovation
        
        determined by population size and interconnectivity of people and knowledge
        
        factors
        
        Sociality
        
        transmission fidelity
        
        Transmission variance
        
        collective thought breeds innovation
        
        driven by
        
        3 more items...
- - - - The more social the animal and expansive their social network, the more difficult it is to maintain brain function with an insufficient diet, diet must be balanced correctly
    - - large brains allow the social transmission of behaviour
      - Social learning has high fitness benefits, would be under strong selective forces
      - Vygotskyan intelligence
        
        intrinsic cooperation
      - Scheherazade Hypothesis
        
        Large brains were sexually selected in mate choice as signals of an individual’s cooperation as part of a bonded pair
  - - - precocial developement
      - predation
        
        predation from terrestrial species
      - group living
        
        social competition
        
        sexual
        
        resources
      - increased sociality
    - - hominin differentiation from genus pan
        
        stone tools
        
        larger skull size
        
        bipedal
        
        sagittal crest
        
        small flat cannines
      - hominin differentiation from australopithicus
        
        larger brain
        
        small chewing teeth
        
        smaller jaw
        
        widening forehead
        
        obligate long range bipedal
        
        widely distributed across world
    - - climate change
        
        if a stable climate changed and was the habitat for a species, they would either have to migrate or perish (neandertals)
      - hominin species walked out of africa across the world
      - created isolated pockets of hominids across the world
        
        rapid evolution and differentiation
    - - climate
        
        Cooling, drying, expansion of savannah
        
        forces migration and adaptation
        
        climate pulses
        
        force extreme rapid change of hominin behavious
      - predation
        
        movement into open plains with no protection
        
        terrestrial primates living in large groups to protect themselves
        
        Across mammals, large brain size in prey reduces predation risk–Predators prefer prey with small brains
      - sociality #
        
        Imposes cognitive demands due to the need to solve environmental problems in a coordinated social environment
        
        creates TOM and creation of empathy
        
        living in larger groups to consolidate resources
      - Metabolic demands
        
        Use of fire for cooking made food more digestible
        
        cooperative foraging
        
        high energy food options
        
        innovation of cooking and food preparation
      - language
        
        increases an individual’s understanding of the world
        
        Leads to distributed cognition
        
        neural substrate for symbolic thought
- - - - creation of the precocial complex in primates
        
        offspring clings to mother for beginning of life
        
        increased sociality
        
        more time given for early brain developement
        
        precocial traits
        
        Long lifespans
        
        Small litter sizes
        
        Developed young
        
        Low mortality
        
        Large body and brain size
        
        Environmental predicability
        
        Living at carrying capacity
        
        Increased grasping and climbing abilities
        
        increased hand eye coordination
        
        visual sensory evolutions in primates
        
        segregation of M and P cells
        
        allows for different depths of vision to be processed
        
        LGN processing both layers separately as different images
        
        primate vision focused on depth of image and not surrounding
        
        1 more item...
        
        M and K cells project to the SC
        
        create a detailed sensory map of surroundings
        
        1 more item...
        
        SC sends map to motor cortex, visual cortex and frontal cortex
        
        blobs
        
        K layers of the LGN target specialized compartments within area V1
        
        receive input from K layers of the LGN
        
        multilevel organization of visual and sensory cortex
        
        primates adapted to quick and fast thinking based on visual information
        
        primates adapted to bilateral movement and muscle coordination involving grasping
        
        Specializations of the Primate Frontal Cortex
        
        Ventral premotor area
        
        sensory map of the body in brain
        
        highly mapped forelimb and orofacial representations