It’s a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind

Darwinism can explain cognitive psychology, says Penn State cognitive psychologist Rosenbaum, but our brains are not mere hubs of ancient neural modules, formed to meet Pleistocene needs and slow to adapt. Evolutionary psychology, Rosenbaum notes, too often draws conclusions from weak evidence, like the idea that bee-stung lips attract men because they imply fertility. Rather, he more narrowly contends that Darwin’s selectionism reigns in the brain. “I believe Darwin’s theory or... a theory that adopts a selectionist (survival-of-the-fittest) perspective, provides a way to place all cognitive phenomena under one tree.” Regarding attention, he states that “it’s impossible to have more than one thought at a time.” Brain regions cooperate and compete to ensure that a neural dominance occurs, which allows us to focus. Many neural mechanisms involve competition and cooperation—“the ultimate mediators of all experience”—they are at the heart of Darwinian selectionism. Rosenbaum was inspired, he says in a footnote, by the “Neural Darwinism” of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, who applied natural selection to neural organization in neurophysiology—if not psychology. Tying the vicissitudes of psychology to any one principle, even loosely, is bold, but Rosenbaum’s careful prose will ignite thoughtful debate, not the heated arguments evolutionary psychology often arouses. (Mar.)