Evolution of the Brain. Creation of the Self

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human beings possessed of reflective consciousness. Eccles traces the line of human evolutionary descent through developments such as skilled bipedal walking and dawning spirituality, linking them with the growth of the human brain. He conjectures that the beginning of human language came with Homo habilis and its greatly enlarged brain, while the mystery of self-consciousness is related to the newly developing neocortical areas of the brain.

Brain and Soul: new ways of looking at an old problem

The main ideas that I would like to transmit in my talk are as follows:

1) The neuroscience is a biological discipline, which was aimed in its foundation as an interdisciplinary common research. That is, in my opinion, the main reason for showing a great ability of growing in knowledge integration as we have seen and experienced in the last forty years.

2) However, one of the most remarkable hints in this integrative development could be summarized in the following question: why the humanities studies have recently been of great interest for the neuroscience itself?

3) To answer this crucial interdisciplinary enquiry, I will try to give you an idea about how difficult has been for this neurobiological discipline to fully develop an explanation of the human being as a whole from the unique perspective of the functioning of the nervous system.

4) In a final approach and in contrast with the above-mentioned in n. 3, I will attempt to illustrate how coherent and consistent are the recent neurobiological discoveries (specially related to the field of the systems neurobiology) and the anthropological view of the aristotelian-thomistic philosophical tradition.

José Manuel Giménez-Amaya