... if it could not have linked up to pre-existing thought systems.” —NOAM CHOMSKY, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, MIT “Boston University’s Andrey Vyshedskiy brings a neuroscientist’s perspective to the discussion of human mental history in On the Origin of the Human Mind.” —Scientific American Mind (July 2009) “I found the Mental Synthesis theory stimulating...

Introduction While studying the neuroscience of consciousness, I was struck with certain facts about mental imagery that seemed to shed some light on the process of the evolution of the human mind. The origin of the human mind remains one of the greatest mysteries of all times. The last 150 years, since Charles Darwin proposed that species evolve under the influence of natural selection (Darwin C, 1859), have been marked by great discoveries. Molecular biology described the genetic principles underlying species evolution and identified specific changes in the human genome since our lineage split off from the chimpanzee line about six million years ago (Somel M, 2013). Great paleontological discoveries have filled that span of six million years of human evolution with a number of intermediate species that display both human- and ape-like characteristics. However, the discussion of the evolution of the human intellect and specific forces that shaped the underlying brain evolution is as vigorous today as it was in Darwin’s times. At the center of the predicament about the origin of the human mind lies the question of human uniqu...

Introduction 1 Part 1. Neuroscience of imagination 5 Chapter 1. Object encoding in the brain 6 Chapter 2. Neuronal synchronization 26 Chapter 3. Imagining new objects 32 Chapter 4. External manifestations of mental synthesis 39 Chapter 5. Humans versus animals 80 Chapter 6: Overall Discussion of Part 1 108 Part 2. Evolution of the Human Mind 135 Chapter 7. Introduction: a quick guide to paleoanthropology 136 Chapter 8. Cognitive evolution through the prism of paleontological evidence 160 Chapter 9. Evolutionary pressure drives better predator detection 191 Chapter 10. Overall Discussion of Part 2 219 Part 3. The “last” mutation 254 Chapter 11. The role of the prefrontal cortex in the process of mental synthesis 256 Chapter 12. Evolution of the prefrontal cortex 277 Conclusions 327 A wish list of experiments 339 Appendix 367 Acknowledgments 400 Bibliography 401 Illustrations credits 428 About the author 430 ...