Brain One: housekeeping brain. This is the brain we share with birds, and reptiles. We humans share this brain with older mammals like dogs, cats, and horses, and even mice. Mammals have “feelings” like ours. Brain Two: emotion. We’ll be looking at the structures of the limbic system in the sections on mood, memory, and hormone control.
In humans the cortex has grown to a huge size, somehow in association with our development of language. Other primates like chimpanzees, or monkeys, have much less cortex, which is surprising since chimpanzee DNA differs from ours by only 1.6%. With this brain, primates can do things that horses and cows cannot, like complex social interactions and advance planning. By taking all the Brain Tours you’ll see each of these parts and get a better sense of how this set of structures is positioned underneath the cortex.
The R brain is just a big swelling at the top of a spinal cord, and that’s how it developed. Next we’ll add the layer that makes mammals behave so differently from reptiles. It was not a remodel so much as an addition, like adding on bedrooms all the way around a kitchen/bathroom. This addition covers the entire R complex, leaving the R complex deep within the brain.
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