VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

B. A Neural Encephalization from Minimal Stirrings to an Earthuman Cognizance

Watanabe, Shigeru, et al, eds. Evolution of the Brain, Cognition, and Emotion in Vertebrates. International: Springer, 2017. Senior editors SW (Japan), Michel Hofman, (Netherlands) and Toru Shimizu (Florida) provide a wide-ranging survey to date as our own nascent worldwide sapiensphere proceeds to reconstruct and quantify the long course of cerebral and cognitive emergence that gave rise to this global faculty. See for example The Origins of the Bird Brain (Toru Shimizu, et al) The Evolution of Mammalian Brains (Jon Kaas), The Evolution of Cognitive Brains in Non-mammals (Andrew Iwaniuk) On the Matter of Mind (Michel Hofman) and Integration Hypothesis: A Parallel Model of Language Development (Shigeru Miyagawa).

This book presents a new view on the evolution of the brain, cognition, and emotion. Some 50 years ago, Harry Jerison published Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence which scoped out studies on these topics. Herein we offer a collection of work to date by way of many new insights and understandings. In regard, it focuses on three prime aspects: an integrated approach called evolutionary developmental biology or Evo/Devo; much new information about the brains of diverse animal groups; and behavioral studies which demonstrate that cognition and emotion can be found found in many non-primate and even non-mammalian species.

Williams, Caroline. A Beautiful Mind. New Scientist. June 11, 2011. A science writer lauds this heretofore daunting quantification of the neural regimen and cognitive acumen of the cephalopod octopus, which can be seen as a primordial instance of how brain and intelligence began their evolutionary ascent.

Yopak, Kara, et al. A Conserved Pattern of Brain Scaling from Sharks to Primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107/12946, 2010. A team of neuroscientists from Australia, Sweden, and the United States, including Barbara Finlay and Richard Darlington, report remarkable cerebral similarities between such widely separate Metazoan species. Once again it can be increasingly surmised that evolution retains the same basic neural anatomy, which then ramifies and deploys by an interplay of concerted and mosaic size and capacity as emergent encephalization proceeds to our retrospective description.

Several patterns of brain allometry previously observed in mammals have been found to hold for sharks and related taxa (chondrichthyans) as well. In each clade, the relative size of brain parts, with the notable exception of the olfactory bulbs, is highly predictable from the total brain size. Compared with total brain mass, each part scales with a characteristic slope, which is highest for the telencephalon and cerebellum. In addition, cerebellar foliation reflects both absolute and relative cerebellar size, in a manner analogous to mammalian cortical gyrification. This conserved pattern of brain scaling suggests that the fundamental brain plan that evolved in early vertebrates permits appropriate scaling in response to a range of factors, including phylogeny and ecology, where neural mass may be added and subtracted without compromising basic function. (12946)

Yoshida, M., et al. Molecular Evidence for Convergence and Parallelism in Evolution of Complex Brains of Cephalopod Molluscs: Insights from Visual Systems. Integrative & Comparative Biology. 55/6, 2015. In a Dawn of Neuronal Organization section, a team from research institutes in Japan and Florida including Leonid Moroz (search) find these quite intelligent invertebrates to have an equivalent cerebral capacity to vertebrates. Once again, such 2010s worldwide findings affirm a persistence for life to form and elaborate similar neural architectures as an inherent evolutionary encephalization.

Coleoid cephalopods show remarkable evolutionary convergence with vertebrates in their neural organization, including (1) eyes and visual system with optic lobes, (2) specialized parts of the brain controlling learning and memory, such as vertical lobes, and (3) unique vasculature supporting such complexity of the central nervous system. We performed deep sequencing of eye transcriptomes of pygmy squids (Idiosepius paradoxus) and chambered nautiluses (Nautilus pompilius) to decipher the molecular basis of convergent evolution in cephalopods. RNA-seq was complemented by in situ hybridization to localize the expression of selected genes. We found three types of genomic innovations in the evolution of complex brains: (1) recruitment of novel genes into morphogenetic pathways, (2) recombination of various coding and regulatory regions of different genes, often called “evolutionary tinkering” or “co-option”, and (3) duplication and divergence of genes. In summary, the cephalopod convergent morphological evolution of the camera eyes was driven by a mosaic of all types of gene recruitments. In addition, our analysis revealed unexpected variations of squids’ opsins, retinochromes, and arrestins, providing more detailed information, valuable for further research on intra-ocular and extra-ocular photoreception of the cephalopods. (Abstract)

Zacks, Oryan and Eva Jablonka.. The evolutionary origins of the Global Neuronal Workspace in vertebrates. Neuroscience of Consciousness. Number 1, 2023. . Tel Aviv University neuro-philosophers contribute a latest illustrated survey by joining this popular model (see below) with their own Associative Learning Theory (see EJ). The GWT considers five perception, motor control, memory, value and attention categories, which are seen to be graphically arrayed across the evolution of eels, fish, reptile, avian and mammals. These further insights that can be newly traced back to earliest inklings, serve to define life’s sensory, cognitive, knowledge gaining progression to our worldwide retrospective discovery.

The Global Neuronal Workspace theory offers a functional architecture that relates consciousness to cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, memory, and evaluation. We show that this popular version corresponds to the cognitive-affective model proposed by Unlimited Associative Learning theory. However, when applied to basal vertebrates, they both require modifications due to what has been learned about the evolution of the brain. Comparative studies suggest that the Global Neuronal Workspace is instantiated by the event memory system found in the hippocampal homolog. This proposal has testable predictions for understanding hippocampal and cortical functions, and the relations between memory and consciousness. (Abstract)

In this paper, we have discussed the evolutionary origin of the GNW architecture, which, we suggested, is an essential part ofmthe dynamic frame that underlies minimal consciousness in vertebrates. We believe that a similar evolutionary analysis may be applied to other theories of consciousness that are centered on humans, such as IIT and recurrent processing. Since an origin-focused evolutionary
approach can uncover fundamental principles of minimal consciousness, we expect that such analyses will both suggest better differentiation among different theories and highlight their common ground. (14)

Global workspace theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s. It was developed to qualitatively account for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. GWT has been influential in modeling consciousness and higher-order cognition as emerging from competition and integrated flows of information across widespread, parallel neural processes.

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