num_pages: 0
description: If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions you're smart. But intelligence is what you need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator trying to figure out what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never spoken before. As Jean Piaget said intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do when all the standard answers are inadequate. This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one topic to another as we create and reject alternatives. Ever since Darwin we've known that elegant things can emerge (indeed self-organize) from simpler beginnings. And says theoretical neurophysiologist William H. Calvin the bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution of a new animal speciesexcept that the brain can turn the Darwinian crank a lot faster on the time scale of thought and action. Drawing on anthropology evolutionary biology linguistics and the neurosciences Calvin also considers how a more intelligent brain developed using slow biological improvements over the last few million years. Long ago evolving jack-of-all trades versatility was encouraged by abrupt climate changes. Now evolving intelligence uses a nonbiological augmenting human intelligence and building intelligent machines.
language: English
title: How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now
publisher: Basic Books