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

Hotheads 371the Modern Mammalian Brain, the neocortex that grew wild in humanevolution and that houses the intellect. The belief that the emotions areanimal legacies is also familiar from pop ethology documentaries inwhich snarling baboons segue into rioting soccer hooligans as the voiceoverfrets about whether we will rise above our instincts and stave offnuclear doom.One problem for the triune theory is that the forces of evolution donot just heap layers on an unchanged foundation. Natural selection hasto work with what is already around, but it can modify what it finds. Mostparts of the human body came from ancient mammals and before themancient reptiles, but the parts were heavily modified to fit features of thehuman lifestyle, such as upright posture. Though our bodies carry vestigesof the past, they have few parts that were unmodifiable and adaptedonly to the needs of older species. Even the appendix is currently put touse, by the immune system. The circuitry for the emotions was not leftuntouched, either.Admittedly, some traits are so much a part of the architectural plan ofan organism that selection is powerless to tinker with them. Might thesoftware for the emotions be burned so deeply into the brain that organismsare condemned to feel as their remote ancestors did? The evidencesays no; the emotions are easy to reprogram. Emotional repertoires varywildly among animals depending on their species, sex, and age. Withinthe mammals, we find the lion and the lamb. Even within dogs (a singlespecies), a few millennia of selective breeding have given us pit bulls andSaint Bernards. The genus closest to ours embraces common chimpanzees,in which gangs of males massacre rival gangs and females canmurder one another's babies, and the pygmy chimpanzees (bonobos),whose philosophy is "Make love not war." Of course, some reactions arewidely shared across species—say, panic when one is confined—but thereactions may have been retained because they are adaptive for everyone.Natural selection may not have had complete freedom to reprogram.the emotions, but it had a lot.And the human cerebral cortex does not ride piggyback on an ancientlimbic system, or serve as the terminus of a processing stream beginningthere. The systems work in tandem, integrated by many two-way connections.The amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried in each temporallobe, houses the main circuits that color our experience with emotions.It receives not just simple signals (such as of loud noises) from the lowerstations of the brain, but abstract, complex information from the brain's