This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows.
