Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

184 I HOW THE MIND WORKSfor understanding speech, have grown, and the prefrontal lobes, the scatof deliberate thought and planning, have ballooned to twice what a primateour size should have. While the brains of monkeys and apes aresubtly asymmetrical, the human brain, especially in the areas devoted tolanguage, is so lopsided that the two hemispheres can be distinguishedby shape in the jar. And there have been takeovers of primate brain areasfor new functions, Uroca's area, involved in speech, has a homoiogue(evolutionary counterpart) in monkeys, but they obviously don't use it forspeech, and they don't even seem to use it to produce shrieks, barks, andother calls.^^^^^^^^^^mIts interesting to find these differences, but the human hrain couldbe radically different from an ape's brain even if one looked like a perfectscale model of the other. The real action is in the patterns of connectionsamong neurons, just as the differences in content among different computerprograms, microchips, hooks, or videoeassettes lie not in theirgross shapes but in the combinatorial arrangements of their tiny constituents.Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitryerf the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteerswilling to give up their brains to science before they are dead. If we couldsomehow read the code in the neural circuitry of growing humans andapes, we would surely find substantial differences.Are the marvelous algorithms of animals mere "instincts" that we havelost or risen above? Humans arc often said to hove no instincts beyondthe vegetative functions; wc are said to reason and behave flexibly, Ireedfrom specialized machinery. The featherless biped surely understandsastronomy in a sense that the feathered biped does not! Irue enough,but it is not because we have fewer instincts than other animals: it isbecause we have more- Our vaunted flexibility comes from scores ofinstincts assembled into programs and pitted in competitions. Darwincalled human language, the epitome of flexible behavior, "an instinct toacquire an art" (giving me the title for The Language Instinct), and hisfollower William James pressed the point;Nou', why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange things, inthe presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen, for example,