The Prehistory of the Brain Collective brings together systems and cognitive neuroscientists, developmental neuroscientists, and (would love to recruit some) comparative neuroanatomists, to jointly take into consideration the central theory of biology – the theory of evolution – and its influence on the structure and organization of the brain.
Our hands are anatomical extensions for grasping and manipulating objects, but their evolution and development reveal their prehistory as feet. Similarly, the hippocampus is conceived as an episodic memory repository, the prefrontal cortex as an executive decision maker, and the primary sensory cortices as immutable feature detectors---what might the prehistory of the brain tell us of the selective pressures that originally honed these structures? While the function of the neural system in modern humans may no longer reflect these original pressures, the underlying mechanisms nonetheless provide a scaffold that constrains the contemporary neural architecture.