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The deep history of ourselves : the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains / Joseph LeDoux ; illustrations by Caio da Silva Sorrentino.

by LeDoux, Joseph E., author.

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[New York] : Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019]

Brain -- Evolution.

Nervous system -- Evolution.

Behavior evolution.

9780735223837 (hardcover) :

xviii, 412 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Preface -- Prologue: Why on earth...? -- Part 1: Our place in nature. Deep roots ; The tree of life ; Kingdoms come ; Common ancestry ; It's a livin' thing -- Part 2: Survival and behavior. The behavior or organisms ; Beyond animal behavior ; The earliest survivors ; Survival strategies and tactics ; Rethinking behavior -- Part 3: Microbial life. In the beginning ; Life itself ; Survival machines ; The arrivals of organelles ; The marriage or LUCA's children ; Breathing new life into old -- Part 4: The transition to complexity. Size matters ; The sexual revolution ; Mitochondrial Eve, Jesse James, and the origin of sex ; Colonial times ; The selection two-step ; Flagellating through the bottleneck -- Part 5: ...And then animals invented neurons. What is an animal? ; A humble beginning ; Animals take shape ; The magic of neurons ; How neurons and nervous systems happened -- Part 6: Metazoan bread crumbs in the oceans. Facing forward ; Tissue issues ; Oral or anal? ; Deep-sea deuterostomes link us to our past ; A tale of two chords -- Part 7: The vertebrates arrive. Bauplan vertebrata ; The life aquatic ; On the surface ; The milk trail -- Part 8: Ladders and trees in the vertebrate brain. Neuro-bauplan vertebrata ; Ludwig's ladder ; The triune temptress ; Darwin's muddled emotional psychology ; How basic are basic emotions? -- Part 9: The beginning of cognition. Cogitation ; Finding cognition in the behaviorist bailiwick ; The evolution of behavioral flexibility -- Part 10: Surviving (and thriving) by thinking. Deliberation ; The engine of deliberative cognition ; Schmoozing -- Part 11: Cognitive hardwire. Perception and memory share circuitry ; The cognitive coalition ; Rewired and running hot -- Part 12: Subjectivity. Being there ; What is it like to be conscious? ; I want to take you higher ; Higher awareness in the brain -- Part 13: Consciousness through the looking glass of memory. The invention of experience ; Ah, memory ; Putting memories in their places ; Higher-order awareness through the lens of memory -- Part 14: The shallows. The tricky problem of other minds ; Creeping up on consciousness ; Kinds of minds -- Part 15: Emotional subjectivity. The slippery slopes of emotional semantics ; Can survival circuits save the day? ; Thoughtful feelings ; Emotional brains run HOT ; Survival is deep, but our emotions are shallow -- Epilogue: Can we survive our self-conscious selves? -- Appendix: Timeline of the history of life.

"Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This page-turning survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human." --Amazon.

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