Image
Top
Navigation

Big Brain

The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (March 4, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1403979782 ISBN-13: 978-1403979780

Book Illustration Figure Legends

"Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence" figure 2.1 – The organization of the brain parallels the organization of the body, so the nose goes to the front of the brain, the hind-legs to the back, and eyes and ears to areas in the middle. Note that this means that each body region, or organ, has its own space in the brain.

 

 

Robot Samples the Worldfigure 2.3 – Robots using computers as brains would process sights and sounds in a manner quite different than animals. Digital versions of the signals are immediately coded into a random-access memory system (“memory”) so that no replicas of the rose or the sound waves are to be found the heads of the “brainbots”. A central program that deals with all sensory information accomplishes storage and retrieval.

 

 figure 7.4 – The frontal cortex in action. The frontal regions select a pitch (slider, change-up, etc.) from a repertoire of stored (learned) possibilities and initiate appropriate movements by activating the motor cortex and its direct axon projections down to “motor” neurons in the spinal cord.

 

 

Skull Capsfigure 12.2 – Possible appearance of the Boskops. Skull caps from fossils are shown at the top left. The light lines are for various Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, and modern people. A Boskop skull is indicated by the dark line. The right-hand panel is a speculative reconstruction of a complete Boskop head. The shaded zones are drawings of particular bones uncovered by physical anthropologists.