How it is to be the brain of a monkey.
Hypotheses are presented on neural peculiarities of the monkey brain that distinguish monkeys from other mammals and man: The unique feature of cortical tissue is that it can be applied serially. It fulfils some requirements of a powerful visual system. The richness of visual as compared to other signals has yielded a basis for recognizing the bodily similarity of oneself to conspecifics. A visuo/motor coupling trained on oneself but applied to conspecifics ("aping") evolved. Long series of (generalized visuo/visual) computations feasible in a very large cortex would produce excessive delays that would not correspond to outer world delays. The new human solution to this is an "offline" system in which temporal relationships are described by excitation patterns. This gives rise to a rapid expansion of the cortex. In humans, a "meaning" has to be attributed to the mutual (computational) relationships of excitation patterns in the offline system, by a reference to the corresponding relationships that would be valid in the normal (online) system. "Perception" is a corollary of this. The offline treatment of time, together with "aping", leads to new types of helping and other social interactions. Monkeys may be compared to humans not using their offline system in the state of "absent-mindedness". Experimental approaches departing from excitation patterns are discussed.
Institut für Biophysik, AG Hirnforschung, Freiburg, Germany. kruger@sun01.brain.uni-freiburg.de
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D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D000882:Haplorhini / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D013045:Species Specificity; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology