21 Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience

Paying homage to the brain is an exercise in futility and under-statement, and as such, it is perhaps best approached with humor by the likes of the American comedian Woody Allen who once rhetori-cally noted, “My brain? That’s my second favorite organ. ” The com-plexity of the brain in the modern human is certain; there is no need to point out the brain’s sophistication to those who even casually study it. At the risk of invoking a second attempt at humor, I can recall one student at the end of an arduous semester of physiological psychology claiming that, “The only thing that made sense in this class was learn-ing on the first day that that the frontal lobes are in the front of the brain.” Each of the three fields invoked by the term evolutionary cognitive neuroscience (ECN) is sufficiently complex on its own. When these three fields are joined togetherin a single systems approach, it quickly becomes obvious that the complexity has expanded exponentially rather than arithmetically. The clear reward of a systems approach is the synergy resulting from melding different subdisciplines and the more integrated overview of what we wish to examine, namely, the organization, func-tion, maintenance, and development of neural systems. The danger of such an approach lies in its very generality, and the consequent danger of losing sight of the contributions of the subdisciplines when studied in isolation. In effect, researchers risk becoming generalists in everything, specialists in nothing. The tension between a systems approach and studying specifically defined subfields in isolation is reflected daily in discussions among researchers in ECN. We examine the brain and its related systems with the understanding that the brain is derived in part from modularized net-works and regions that sometimes provide specific functions, and that these modules do not function in isolation, because they are influence