Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self

The author of this book, Sir John Eccles, was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on conduction in the central nervous system and its implications for the mammalian brain. In this book, he tells the story of how man came to be as he is, not only as an animal at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as a human being possessed of reflective consciousness. He traces the line of human evolutionary descent through developments such as skilled bipedal walking and dawning spirituality, linking them with the development of the human brain. He suggests that the beginnings of human language came with homo habilis and his greatly enlarged brain, and relates the mystery of self-consciousness to the developing neocortical areas of the brain.