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The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

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Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today


Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human.

In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms. By tracking the chain of the evolutionary timeline he shows how even the earliest single-cell organisms had to solve the same problems we and our cells have to solve each day. Along the way, LeDoux explores our place in nature, how the evolution of nervous systems enhanced the ability of organisms to survive and thrive, and how the emergence of what we humans understand as consciousness made our greatest and most horrendous achievements as a species possible.

ISBN-13: 9780735223851

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Publication Date: 08-25-2020

Pages: 432

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University. He directs the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU and at The Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and is Deputy Director of the Max Planck-NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. LeDoux's books include Anxious, Synaptic Self, and The Emotional Brain, and he is a singer and songwriter in the folkrock band the Amygdaloids, and in the acoustic duo So We Are. He lives with his wife Nancy Princenthal in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface xv

Prologue: Why on Earth …? 1

Part 1 Our Place in Nature

Chapter 1 Deep Roots 9

Chapter 2 The Tree of Life 13

Chapter 3 Kingdoms Come 17

Chapter 4 Common Ancestry 20

Chapter 5 It's a Livin' Thing 24

Part 2 Survival and Behavior

Chapter 6 The Behavior of Organisms 29

Chapter 7 Beyond Animal Behavior 35

Chapter 8 The Earliest Survivors 39

Chapter 9 Survival Strategies and Tactics 44

Chapter 10 Rethinking Behavior 48

Part 3 Microbial Life

Chapter 11 In the Beginning 53

Chapter 12 Life Itself 57

Chapter 13 Survival Machines 63

Chapter 14 The Arrival of Organelles 68

Chapter 15 The Marriage of LUCA's Children 71

Chapter 16 Breathing New Life into Old 74

Part 4 The Transition to Complexity

Chapter 17 Size Matters 79

Chapter 18 The Sexual Revolution 82

Chapter 19 Mitochondrial Eve, Jesse James, and the Origin of Sex 88

Chapter 20 Colonial Times 91

Chapter 21 The Selection Two-Step 95

Chapter 22 Flagellating Through the Bottleneck 100

Part 5 … And Then Animals Invented Neurons

Chapter 23 What Is an Animal? 107

Chapter 24 A Humble Beginning 115

Chapter 25 Animals Take Shape 119

Chapter 26 The Magic of Neurons 124

Chapter 27 How Neurons and Nervous Systems Happened 127

Part 6 Metazoan Bread Crumbs in the Oceans

Chapter 28 Facing Forward 137

Chapter 29 Tissue Issues 141

Chapter 30 Oral or Anal? 145

Chapter 31 Deep-Sea Deuterostomes Link Us to Our Past 148

Chapter 32 A Tale of Two Chords 151

Part 7 The Vertebrates Arrive

Chapter 33 Bauplan Vertebrata 157

Chapter 34 The Life Aquatic 161

Chapter 35 On the Surface 165

Chapter 36 The Milk Trail 171

Part 8 Ladders and Trees in the Vertebrate Brain

Chapter 37 Neuro-Bauplan Vertebrata 179

Chapter 38 Ludwig's Ladder 183

Chapter 39 The Triune Temptress 188

Chapter 40 Darwin's Muddled Emotional Psychology 192

Chapter 41 How Basic Are Basic Emotions? 195

Part 9 The Beginning of Cognition

Chapter 42 Cogitation 203

Chapter 43 Finding Cognition in the Behaviorist Bailiwick 208

Chapter 44 The Evolution of Behavioral Flexibility 216

Part 10 Surviving (and Thriving) by Thinking

Chapter 45 Deliberation 225

Chapter 46 The Engine of Deliberative Cognition 228

Chapter 47 Schmoozing 234

Part 11 Cognitive Hardware

Chapter 48 Perception and Memory Share Circuitry 243

Chapter 49 The Cognitive Coalition 249

Chapter 50 Rewired and Running Hot 255

Part 12 Subjectivity

Chapter 51 Being There 263

Chapter 52 What Is It Like to Be Conscious? 269

Chapter 53 I Want to Take You Higher 277

Chapter 54 Higher Awareness in the Brain 281

Part 13 Consciousness Through the Looking Glass of Memory

Chapter 55 The Invention of Experience 289

Chapter 56 Ah, Memory 294

Chapter 57 Putting Memories in Their Places 300

Chapter 58 Higher-Order Awareness Through the Lens of Memory 305

Part 14 The Shallows

Chapter 59 The Tricky Problem of Other Minds 315

Chapter 60 Creeping Up on Consciousness 324

Chapter 61 Kinds of Minds 329

Part 15 Emotional Subjectivity

Chapter 62 The Slippery Slopes of Emotional Semantics 337

Chapter 63 Can Survival Circuits Save the Day? 344

Chapter 64 Thoughtful Feelings 350

Chapter 65 Emotional Brains Run HOT 359

Chapter 66 Survival Is Deep, but Our Emotions Are Shallow 368

Epilogue: Can We Survive Our Self-Conscious Selves? 372

Appendix 381

Bibliographic Key 383

Illustration Credits 401

Index 403