The Deep History of Ourselves Quotes

“The machinery includes all of the biological requirements of being a self-sustaining organism, including a set of mutually compatible genes, immunological self-recognition, and a homeostatic mechanism that maintains self-regulating body functions. It also includes a variety of behavioral tendencies, often referred to as personality or temperament, that depend on either genetic influences or learning and that are expressed automatically—you don’t have to consciously remember your core personality.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“These narrative moves reduce dissonance and help maintain a sense of control and personal unity.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“But protozoa, being single-cell organisms, don’t have nervous systems, since that would require special cells—neurons—and they only possess one all-purpose cell. Yet they have a robust behavioral life—they swim away from harmful chemicals and toward useful ones—and they even use past experience to guide their present responses, suggesting that they have the ability to learn and remember. The logical conclusion is that behavior, learning, and memory don’t actually require a nervous system. This was eye-opening to me, so I did a little research to see what was known about”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“One way that scientists have tried to figure out how sustainable cells came to be is by attempting to simulate the early chemistry of a primordial pond or ocean. The most famous example is an experiment performed by Stanley Miller, working in the Harold Urey laboratory in the 1950s. Miller put chemicals that he thought might have been present in the primordial atmosphere (hydrogen, ammonia, and methane gases) in water and passed electricity (simulating lightning) through the mixture, hoping to trigger the conversion of prebiotic carbon-based compounds into biological compounds (figure 12.1). Several days later Miller found that amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, a key ingredient of life, had formed, demonstrating that inorganic elements, in the presence of heat, can form biological compounds.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“Behavior did not arise to serve the subjective mind. It came about and persists to enhance fitness—to keep organisms alive and well so that reproduction can occur. This perspective puts the behavior of humans and bacteria, and all organisms in between, on a level playing field, one in which consciousness, in the sense that humans mean by the term in everyday life, has a peripheral role in most of the history of life. If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“An organism is a living thing, an entity that functions as a physiological unit, the component parts of which operate with a high degree of cooperation and a low degree of conflict to help ensure well-being and sustain the life of the overall entity and to reproduce itself so that its kind can continue. The mission of an organism is simple: It is to acquire nutrients and energy so that growth can occur and life can be sustained to at least the point of reproduction.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“Earlier I defined cognition as the ability to form internal representations and use them in guiding behavior. There is a movement afoot to extend the conception of cognition beyond its role in using internal representations to guide behavior so that plants and microorganisms can be said to be cognitive creatures. Some do this by equating cognition with information processing. Since all behavior involves information processing, all behavior would, under this theory, involve cognition. Others take a different tack, defining cognition as the adaptive regulation of states and interactions by an agent with respect to the consequences for the agent’s own viability.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“Early behavioral researchers around the turn of the twentieth century, such as Conwy Lloyd Morgan and Herbert Spencer Jennings, were very interested in single-cell protists, specifically the protozoan known as paramecia (figure 7.1). These were shown to use primitive approach and withdrawal responses called taxic behavior to engage with useful and harmful stimuli in their daily lives. Morgan, for example, noted: “The primary end and object of the receptions of the influences (stimuli) of the external world or environment . . . is to set agoing certain activities. Now in the unicellular organisms, where both the reception and the response are effected by one and the same cell, the activities are for the most part simple, though even among these protozoa there are some which show no little complexity of response” (italics added).”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“Plants clearly sense the environment, learn, store information, and use that information to guide movements; they behave. One might say that there is certain “intelligence” to their behavior. This is true as long as intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to solve problems through behavioral interactions with the environment, rather than with respect to mental capacity.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“But one group did. By 3.5 billion years ago, bacteria had emerged, and continue to this day as the most populous kind of organism on Earth.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“The utility that allowed emotions to persist in the genes of our species may have been the ability to personalize value. Rather than simply detecting risk and avoiding danger, the organism could consider, “How dangerous is this to me?” Other animals can represent value, but only humans can make it personal. In this view, an emotion is the experience that something of value is happening to you. If so, emotions could not exist without autonoesis. No self, no emotion.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“The popular idea of unconscious emotions needs further elaboration. As I stressed throughout this book, emotions can’t be unconscious. On the other hand, because nonconscious schema are building blocks of conscious emotional experiences, feelings can seem to reflect nonconscious emotions. And since schema also influence behavior, actions can seem to have been driven by a nonconscious emotion. But emotion schema are not emotions—they are the cognitive launchpads of emotions.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“The idea of inner speech was made famous by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He noted that it is not quite the same thing as ordinary spoken language, as it is not as formal or rigid. Vygotsky was interested in how children acquire and use inner speech in the process of cognitive development. As explained by Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices, “It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.” Language and deliberative thought, and even consciousness, are closely entwined.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“If we are going to explore cognition from an evolutionary point of view, we need a precise definition of what it is. As used here, cognition will refer to processes that underlie the acquisition of knowledge by creating internal representations of external events and storing them as memories that can later be used in thinking, reminiscing, and musing, and when behaving. Its dependence on internal representations of things or events, in the absence of the external referent of the representation, is what makes cognition different from noncognitive forms of information processing.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“For example, when walking toward a destination (say going to the deli across the street from your office to get a coffee), once you decide to do so, you don’t have to think about how to get there—you just go. Similarly, when you speak you usually do a decent job of generating grammatical sentences without having to consciously plan the placement of the parts of speech. This allows you to consciously think about other things while the routine work is being carried out in the background. But if something goes wrong while on automatic pilot (there is an obstruction along the path to the deli, or a sentence doesn’t come out right), you take notice. That is, unexpected or undesirable events grab our attention, making their presence known as conscious content, moving out whatever else we were thinking about at the time. Control processes of the cognitive unconscious thus not only underlie the information content that we consciously experience but also direct behavioral interactions with the environment. To distinguish the cognitive from the Freudian unconscious, I prefer using the term nonconscious.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“memory is dynamic—it changes by the mere passage of time, or by the accumulation of new experiences.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“one thing that is often missing from conscious awareness is the reason or motivation for why a particular behavior was produced.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“The other theory argues that replication based on nucleic acids (RNA and/or DNA) came after biological entities could support metabolism. Günter Wächtershäuser proposed a version of this metabolism-first theory in which hot water from volcanoes flowed over mineral-rich rocks to ignite (catalyze) chemical reactions that fused simple carbon-based compounds into larger ones. While catalytic enzymes, which are proteins, did not yet exist, minerals, such as those in rocks, can and do function as prebiotic catalysts for chemical reactions. According to this theory, a key step occurred when, through a series of these prebiotic reactions, the circle was closed by the regeneration of the original compound. Through such a process, complex biological molecules (proteins, nucleotides, lipids, and carbohydrates) could be made, forming the basis of simple protocells that made energy and replicated.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“Initially compartmentalization might have been accomplished by a nonbiological transitional entity, a protocell, perhaps formed within pores in rocks. (We’ll consider this in more detail below.) But a protocell in a rock pore, even one containing DNA, would not be capable of sustaining complex life. The evolution of true cells depended on some form of compartmentalization outside of such confined spaces. The eventual solution was a lipid casing (membrane) that sequestered RNA, DNA, and the proteins they make, allowing these entities to exist free-floating in the oceans, where they could self-replicate, diversify (that is, evolve), and give rise to all of the organisms that have ever lived.”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“DNA is believed to have emerged through a transformation of RNA, possibly by a virus that converted an RNA gene into a DNA gene. That”
― Joseph E. LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains