Lecture: Your Evolved Brain: Where our brain came from and why
Saturday 18 February at 2pm
by Professor Rogier Mars
Our brain is both amazing and strange. On the one hand, it gives us all the benefits–general intelligence, advanced social skills, tools use, and language—that have made us such a dominant species. On the other hand, our brain takes 20 years to develop, is very vulnerable to disease, and requires a lot of energy to maintain. To understand how this happened, we need to understand how our brain evolved. Since we can’t go back in time to do this, we are left with comparing our brain to that of other animals. We can try to understand how our brain came to be by investigating how our brain is similar and different to the brains of reptiles, fishes, dogs, and chimpanzees. In this talk, I will take you on a journey of 365 million years of brain evolution to see what it is that makes our brain so special.
