Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess.
The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (2nd Ed.)
A revised edition of the best-selling text on how relationships build our brains. As human beings, we cherish our individuality yet we know that we live in constant relationship to others, and that other people play a significant part in regulating our emotional and social behavior. Although this interdependence is a reality of our existence, we are just beginning to understand that we have evolved as social creatures with interwoven brains and biologies.
Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special
Fascinating and original, Scott-Phillips presents a novel thesis explaining the origins and evolution of language to answer the questions of why language is unique to humans and how language developed. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, biology, linguistics and anthropology, it is essential reading for anyone interested in language's evolution.
In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork, Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.
This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this process led to the properties of language.
