In this section are book titles and reviews from the evolutionary and brain sciences. Many of these offer valuable insights into how humans have emerged as the planet’s premier learning species.

Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, cultures and the human prospect (2000).

Marian Diamond, Ph.D., and Janet Hopson, Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child’s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions from Birth Through Adolescence (1998).

This book, written by one of America’s most respected brain researchers, provides a review for laymen of what is now understood from the neurosciences about how the brain develops from conception through adolescence. Drawing on decades of research the book acts as a practical guide for parents eager to give their children a head start in life.

From the publisher:

How does a child’s mind grow? Is our capacity for learning and creativity limited by our genetic makeup or can the brain respond to stimulation? Recently, scientists and researchers have begun to connect events in the child’s developing brain with specific environmental influences and have found actions, sensations, and memories powerfully shape both function and anatomy. The evidence shows that our ability to acquire new knowledge is far greater than once believed and has tremendous implications for the ways we choose to raise and educate our children – perhaps from the time of conception.

How, then, can parents and teachers provide conditions that will most effectively promote growth and change? In Magic Trees of the Mind, pioneer brain researcher Dr. Marian Diamond and top science journalist Janet Hopson takes us through the evolutionary journey of a child’s brain, showing how our minds are stimulated in specific ways at every age. This mental stimulation produces prolifically branching neurons – the “magic trees of the mind” – which are capable of processing ever greater amounts of information as they grow. Under nature’s own code of “use it or lose it,” a child who experiences appropriate stimulation gains the increased capacity to develop his or her full potential, and is set on the path of lifelong learning.

Based on interviews with noted scientists in the field and original surveys of thousands of parents and children, here are detailed analyses of cutting-edge programs designed to develop and expand your child’s mind, including prenatal stimulation and enrichment ideas for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, grade school children, and teenagers. Complete with a comprehensive resource guide of related books, products, organizations, web sites, and learning centers, Magic Trees of the Mind renews our birthright to “think, learn, and create,” with the encouraging news that, although there are critical periods for learning, it’s never too late to plant another tree.

Drawing on decades of research and including real-life examples of enrichment programs in action, Diamond and Hopson give us an illuminating book that is both a groundbreaking work of science and a practical guide for parents eager to giver their children a head start in life.

(Permission to reprint granted by Penguin Putnam Inc.)

Henry Plotkin, Evolution in Mind: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology (1997). Plotkin shows the reader how the mind is both the product of human evolution and a force in the evolution of our species. Through this mixture of nature and nurture over the course of evolution the human brain comes equipped with certain predisposition to learn key skills and attitudes early on in life.

Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the brain (1997).

From the publisher:

This revolutionary book offers fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience Terrence Deacon shows that:

• The evolution of language did not involve a language organ or instinct, and did not result simply from a larger, more complex brain.
• Language reflected a new mode of thinking: symbolic thinking.
• Symbolic thinking triggered a co-evolutionary exchange between languages and brains over two million years of hominid evolution – “Many of the physical traits that distinguish human bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations.”
• The grammars of the world’s languages are remarkably similar and, despite their complexity, are easily learned by young children, not because of innate grammatical knowledge but because languages have themselves evolved structural adaptations to human cognitive constrained, particularly those of immature brains.
• The first symbolic communication evolved as the only means our hominid ancestors had to overcome the evolutionary difficulties of combining long-term sexual exclusivity, mostly in pair bonds, with cooperative group foraging, which became a critical factor with the utilization of animal foods.
• The reorganization of the brain for language brought with it many indirect and serendipitous consequences, including unprecedented vocal control, unusual “innate” calls like laughter and sobbing, a susceptibility to such mental disorders as schizophrenia and autism, and a compulsion to assign symbolic import to almost every aspect of the physical world.
• An understanding of symbolic communication allows us to reinterpret such aspects of consciousness as rational intention, meaning, belief, and self-consciousness as emergent properties of the virtual world created by symbols. It also points the way to building machines that don’t just manipulate symbols, but understand them.
• Symbolic abilities created a species that for the first time in the history of life had access to other’s thoughts and emotions – and thus confronted an ethical dimension to social behavior.

Informing all these insights is a new understanding, based on the author’s own research and the latest findings in the neurosciences and genetics, of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain’s development and function as well as its evolution. On the road to explaining how this works, Deacon introduces us to Hoover, the world’s one and only talking seal; Sherman and Austin, two chimpanzees struggling with the counterintuitive nature of symbols; and Kanzi, another chimpanzee, who easily acquired advanced language abilities as he observed his mother’s failure to learn symbols.
In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon leads us on a carefully grounded neurobiological expedition into a view of mind that does not reduce to soulless, clockwork mechanism, but is instead an emergent feature of a universe that is “nascent heart and mind.” His book not only provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

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