Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

Introduction

One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives. What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that made us thinking, sentient humans, different from our predecessors.

Analysis

Neuroscience has been fixated on the life of the psychological self for the past fifty years, focusing on the brain systems underlying language, memory, emotion, and perception. What it has not done is consider the stark reality that most of the time we humans are thinking about social processes, comparing ourselves to and estimating the intentions of others. In Human, Gazzaniga explores a number of related issues, including what makes human brains unique, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.

In that one sentence, “Keillor captures humanness.” In his own easy-to-read, conversational style, Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of a slew of popular books, takes off in search of what set humans apart from their predecessors. His entertaining tour includes some of the most lucid explanations of scientific concepts around as well as discursions into art, aesthetics, empathy, ethics, cyborgs, animals on trial and what it would be like to date a chimp. Neuroscience has focused on the brain systems underlying possible decisive traits that are uniquely human—language, memory, emotion—but it has not usually considered the point Keillor intuitively conveys: most of the time humans are thinking about social relationships. We really do want to stay in touch.

In 1976 Stephen Hawking imagined throwing a bit of information—a book, a computer, even an elementary particle—into a black hole. Black holes, Hawking believed, were the ultimate traps, and the bit of information would be irretrievably lost to the outside world. This apparently innocent observation was hardly as innocent as it sounds; it threatened to undermine and topple the entire edifice of modern physics. Something was terribly out of whack; the most basic law of nature—the conservation of information—was seriously at risk. To those who paid attention, either Hawking was wrong or the three-hundred-year-old center of physics wasn't holding. This is a brilliant overview of all the research work that has gone into deciding what makes human beings unique (if we are, but the evidence is strong that we are, among Earth's creatures). It covers everything from the evolution of our social awareness and moral standards to the debate over whether intelligence must remain embodied -- that is, do you need a physical body to develop the kind of consciousness and intelligence that humans have?

To understand human social behavior it is necessary to be familiar with most (if not all) of the material Michael Gazzaniga covers in this seminal summary of how humans are ...