On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Donald McBurney went:

> The triune brain seems to be popular in anthropology and among
> evolutionary psychologists.  It is a serious oversimplificaiton of what
> happened during the evolution of the brain.  The vertebrate brain
> follows a single bauplan (blueprint). Structures expand, functions are
> sometimes redistributed (e.g. much visual function from superior
> colliculus to cortex), and some new structures appear (cortex).  But the
> brain of a lizard must, by definition, do all the perception, cognition,
> etc. of which the lizard is capable.  Evolution of the human brain did
> not happen in a way analogous to how a three scoop ice cream cone is
> created.

I'll agree with all that, and add that you'll almost never hear the
term "triune brain" used by a practicing neuroscientist.  In fact, I
just did a 1966-2003 Medline search for any cooccurrence of the words
"triune" and "brain" in abstracts of published papers, and there were
only 10 hits.

--David Epstein
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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