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Learning About the Brain and Modularity of the Mind
More ways scientists learn about the brain and modularity of the mind:
- Human behaviour studies that control for cultural variables (psychological experimentation)
- Findings from palaeontology—e.g., discovery of a 44,000-year-old bone flute at a Neanderthal site, indicating they had similar mental functioning in music as humans
- Findings from archaeology
- Studies of behaviour and learning in animals, especially our close primate cousins such as chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons
- Genome data—e. g., chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans share more than98% of the same genetic material
The human brain took millions of years to evolve into an incredibly complex, powerful thing of beauty. Dissecting a cadaver’s brain provides no information about the workings of the living, functioning brain. And neurosurgeons cannot open up skulls of living humans simply to poke, prod, and probe through all the billions of tangled microscopic neurons, to see how everything works. So evolutionary psychologists and biologists can and do use data from the sources listed above to, in effect, learn about the brain by reverse engineering the brain as best they can.