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

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

Edens, Brittany, et al.. Neural crest origin of sympathetic neurons at the dawn of vertebrates. Nature. 629/121, 2024. Cal Tech bioengineers including Marianne Bronner describe how they discerned and quantified an earlier invertebrate occasion of this vital attribute. The work merited a review, The sympathetic nervous system arose in the earliest vertebrates, in the same issue: The sympathetic nervous system, which enables the fight-or-flight response, was thought to be present only in jawed vertebrates. Analysis of a jawless vertebrate suggests that this system might be a feature of all animals with a spine. As laboratory instrumentation and computational, machine analysis advance into the 2020s, life’s sentient systems are being traced back to deeper, intrinsic origins. Altogether by now a second cerebral, sensory, quickening orthogenesis becomes distinctly filled in.

The neural crest is an embryonic stem cell population unique to vertebrates whose expansion has promoted their evolution by enabling emergence of new cell types and structures such as jaws and peripheral ganglia. Although jawless vertebrates have sensory ganglia, convention has it that trunk sympathetic chain ganglia arose only in jawed vertebrates. Here, by contrast, we report the presence of trunk sympathetic neurons in the sea lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, an extant jawless vertebrate. Our findings challenge the prevailing dogma that posits that sympathetic ganglia are a gnathostome innovation, instead suggesting that a late-developing rudimentary sympathetic nervous system may have been characteristic of the earliest vertebrates. (Excerpt)

Eichler, Katherina, et al. The Complete Connectome of a Learning and Memory Centre in an Insect Brain. Nature. 548/175, 2017. 17 researchers with postings at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Konstanz, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, and Cambridge University achieve the first full-scale diagram of higher order neural circuits for a Drosophila larvae mushroom body. We add to record how the connectome model can be readily applied to this early, rudimentary stage. Altogether an inkling of life’s evolution as a gestational development is suggested, which just now reaches a novel, consummative phase of its own self-reconstruction.

Ellis, Ralph and Natika Newton, eds. Consciousness & Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice, and Selective Perception. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Technical papers on the brain’s self-organizational dynamics with an emphasis on the “enaction” school of the late Francisco Varela and colleagues.

Estep, Myrna. Self-Organizing Natural Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2006. An Indiana University polymath scholar contests the vested academic view of a narrow, linear, machine-like intellectual capacity, in favor of new appreciations of a nonlinear dynamical nature trying by way of creature and cognition to discover and know itself. A good example of a revolution in our midst to recognize and explain a life and person-friendly natural genesis universe.

I have approached natural intelligence as a multi- and interdisciplinary phenomenon. I view intelligence as very much a part of the natural world and hence as a living thing, an emerging richly textured set of patterns that are highly complex, dynamic, self-organizing, and adaptive. (xxv) Self-organization refers to kinds of pattern-formation processes found in both physical and biological systems. Patterns in self-organizing systems emerge at global levels from large numbers of interactions among lower level components of those systems. (40)

Falk, Dean and Kathleen Gibson, eds. Evolutionary Anatomy of the Primary Cerebral Cortex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. An array of papers which recognize and extend the allometric studies of Harry Jerison on how the evolving brain acts as a single, coordinated organ which expands in overall size through the relative enlargement of its component modules. Michel Hofman notes that our hominid brain has reached structural and energetic limits and further advances in intelligence need take place in the realm of technological evolution.

Finlay, Barbara and Richard Darlington. Linked Regularities in the Development and Evolution of Mammalian Brains. Science. 268/1578, 1995. In the frequently cited paper, a consistent linear scale is seen to occur over an evolutionary time span as ten brain subdivisions steadily expand in size with total brain volume.

Analysis of data collected from 131 species of primates, bats and insectivores showed that the sizes of brain components from medulla to forebrain are highly predictable from absolute brain size by a non- linear function. The order of neurogenesis was found to be highly conserved across a wide range of mammals and to correlate with the relative enlargement of structures as brain size increases, with disproportionately large growth occurring in late-generated structures. (1578)

Freeman, Walter. Societies of Brains. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. An eminent and innovative researcher in nonlinear neuroscience explains the self-organizing dynamics of cerebral evolution and cognitive performance.

Phylogenetic trees of brains in Molluscs (octopuses), Arthropods (spiders) and vertebrates (possums) show a series of increasing complexity. I think there is an equivalent tree of conscious beings ranked in order of capacity. (136)

Fuster, Joaquin. Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. A veteran neuroscientist proposes that the brain operates by integrating its modular domains into dynamic neural networks by which it represents its external locale. In so doing its “Newtonian” phase of modularity is said to be expanded to the important “Relativity” of context and relations. A tacit assumption holds throughout that individual cognition necessarily recapitulates the evolutionary formation of brain anatomy and mental abilities.

To characterize the cognitive structure of a cortical network, I use the term cognit, a generic term for any representation of knowledge in the cerebral cortex. A cognit is an item of knowledge about the world, the self, or the relations between them….In any case, a cognit is defined by its component nodes and by the relations between them. In neural terms, the cognit is made up of assemblies of neurons and the connections between them. (14)
In phylogeny as in ontogeny, the development of the receptive and productive aspects of language is correlated with the development of the cortices of association. (181) In evolution, animals have become progressively more efficient at processing more information in the pursuit of their goals. As intelligence tests show, the same thing is true for a human in his or her formative years. (215)

Gabora, Liane and Kirsty Kitto. Concept Combination and the Origins of Complex Cognition. Swan, Liz, ed. Origins of Mind. Berlin: Springer, 2012. University of British Columbia and Queensland University of Technology psychologists propose, and carefully defend, that an evolutionary advance to modern humans was aided by novel abilities to place isolated objects and episodes into a contextual ground. The cultural stages of Merlin Donald are surely drawn upon, similar to Chris Collins’ Paleopoetics, which this theory well aligns with. As a result, life’s penchant for enhanced creativity is explained through better ways to join artifacts and experiences into new combinations and perspectives. (One is reminded of Arthur Koestler’s 1970s bi-association model.) View each author’s publications for more creative insights about emergent human imaginations, often rising from quantum realms. And may we altogether lately glimpse a self-creating natural genesis that is trying to discover and choose itself?

At the core of our uniquely human cognitive abilities is the capacity to see things from different perspectives, or to place them in new context. We propose that this was made possible by two cognitive transitions. First, the large brain of Homo erectus facilitated the onset of recursive recall: the ability to string thoughts together into a stream of potentially abstractor imaginative thought. Computational modeling of recursive recall in an agent-based artificial society resulted in the agents generating more diverse and valuable cultural outputs. We propose that the capacity to see things in context was enhanced much later, following the appearance of anatomically modern humans. This second transition was brought on by the onset of contextual focus: the capacity to shift between a minimally contextual analytic mode of thought, and a highly contextual associative mode of thought, conducive to combining concepts in new ways and ‘breaking out of a rut’. We summarize how both transitions can be modeled using a theory of concepts, and how they interact and shift in meaning when they appear in different contexts. (Abstract)

Gattoni, Giacomo and Maria Tosches. Constrained roads to complex brains. Science. 387/6735, 2025. Columbia University neuroscientists introduce at length three papers in this issue which provide the latest evidence for nature’s recurrent use of similar cerebral and cognitive structures and functions across Metazon species: Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds by Bastienne Zaremba, et al, Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes by Eneritz Rueda-Alaña, et al and Enhancer-driven cell type comparison reveals similarities between the mammalian and bird pallium by Nikolai Hecker, et al. See also a science news review Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals by Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta (April 7, 2025) of these findings.

During life’s Earthly evolution, highly intelligent biological systems have emerged only a few times. Among vertebrates, mammals and birds can solve problems, use tools, and engage in elaborate social behaviors. These tasks involve the pallium, the brain region most implicated in cognition, which includes the neocortex in mammals. However, it is unclear whether complex brains evolved multiples times through similar or different mechanisms. In this issue, Zaremba et al, Hecker et al, and Rueda-Alaña et al) provide evidence for the convergent development and evolution of neurons and their connections in the bird and mammalian pallia.

Geary, David, et al, eds. Evolutionary Origins and Early Development of Number Processing. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015. With roots in the work of Rochel Gelman and Claude Gallistel, who write a Foreword, this retrospective study illumes across the creaturely procession from invertebrates to primates and homo sapiens a consistent ability to estimate and count, lately as arithmetic and algebra. With chapters by Giorgio Vallortigara, Irene Pepperberg, Tasha Posid and Sara Cordes, Joseph Cantlon, and other authorities, whether fish or fowl a trend evolved from an initial analog mode that could assess quantities into a later symbolic number phase. A parallel theme then notes how infants and children proceed to learn in the same way. To reflect, the whole temporal cosmos appears as a long education to learn numerical categories and alphabet letters so as to write, read, and discover.

Ginsburg, Simona and Eva Jablonka. Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022. The senior Israeli philosophers of science (search) are joined by their illustrator Anna Zeligowski to visually convey how life’s emergent transitions can be seen to facilitate of a parallel ascent of aware, informed sentience. In this convergent year, the edition reveals that this cerebral, cognitive faculty along with its expansive knowledge content serves to define life’s central, salient trend. In regard, from earliest stirrings (see herein) some manner of educative learning process goes on via nested scales all the way to our common planetary retrospect. A succinct capsule can be found on a MIT Press Reader site as How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide (Google this and author’s name). (Excerpts below are from this posting.)

Is there a single, tangible property that when present in an entity means that all the characteristics of consciousness are in place — an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness? We believe that we have identified such a marker as a form of open-ended associative learning, which we call unlimited associative learning (UAL).

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