CHAPTER 1 What Are the Origins of Brain and Behavior

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CHAPTER 1 What Are the Origins of Brain and
Behavior?  
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Defining Brain and Behavior 

• What Is the Brain?
• How Is the Nervous System Structured?  
• What Is Behavior?

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What is the Brain?
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How Is the Nervous System Structured?
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What Is Behavior?
Patterns in time Movement of an organism -
cause function (purposeful?) - complexity
flexibility
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Perspectives on Brain and Behavior  

• Aristotle and Mind  
• Descartes and Dualism
• Descartess Legacy
• Linking Brain Function to Brain Disease  
• Darwin and Materialism  
• Darwins Legacy
• Natural selection  

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Donald Hebb Modern psychology takes
completely for granted that behavior and neural
function are completely correlated, that one is
completely caused by the other. There is no
separate soul or life force to stick a finger
into the brain now and then and make neural cells
do what they would not otherwise. It is quite
conceivable that some day the assumption will
have to be rejected. But it is important also to
see that we have not reached that day yet the
working assumption is a necessary one, and there
is no real evidence to oppose it. One cannot
logically be a determinist in physics and
chemistry and biology, and a mystic in
psychology.
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The Evolution of Brain and Behavior  

• Origin of Brain Cells and Brains  
• Classification Systems  
• Evolution of Animals with Nervous Systems  
• The Chordate Nervous System  

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Taxonomy of living organisms
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cladogram
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Human Evolution  

• Humans Members of the Primate Order  
• Australopithecus Our Distant Ancestor??  
• The First Humans  
• The Evolution of the Human Brain
• Brain size and behavior - proper mass
• Why the hominid brain enlarged 
• (food quality, cooling, neoteny)

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Australopithecus
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Ardipithecus ramidus - 6 million years ago!
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Discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson, Lucy is
special because she lived so long ago (3.2
millions years) and because almost half of her
skeleton was found. (Most fossil finds are just
fragments -- sometimes a tooth or a piece of a
skull.) Johanson named her after Elton John's
1974 hit single, a remake of the Beatles' "Lucy
in the Sky with Diamonds."
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Homids in dryarea Apes in wet jungle area
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EQ brain size / average for body size
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Studying Brain and Behavior in Modern Humans  

• Human Brain-Size Comparisons
• Not reasonable within species  
• Culture  
• - we have culture (complex behavior)

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