“market tested” for effectiveness through natural selection seems like the
wrong approach to understanding the specific functions and potential of the
human brain. By looking at the brain the way we look at machines, which are
themselves man made attempts to duplicate or better what nature does on its
own, we limit our view of the brain and the mind. We impose organizational
structures we are familiar with, and which are in fact the products of the very
organ we are studying rather than products created directly by the natural
forces that shaped that organ, on our analysis of the brain. We think perhaps
in doing so that we can understand the brain the way we understand a watch
or a dishwasher—by dissecting its working parts and studying their individual
structures, functions, and origins.

But perhaps natural forces did not and do not build everything up from dis-
creet, distinguishable parts. Perhaps what we see as “mechanisms” do not
exist and do not operate in functional isolation from each other—perhaps the
levels and layers of the human brain are connected in ways that the machine
model cannot explain to us. We clearly do not understand or know how to
use a large percentage of our brain mass; is it possible that a more open-ended
model of the brain, one less focused on traditional conceptions of machinery,
could help us expand our understanding of the human brain and perhaps even
help us expand our mental capacity?

I do not at all believe that the
theories and concepts involved
with evolutionary psychology
and the study of cognitive psy-
chological mechanisms are irrel-
evant in any way to meaningful
study of the brain. I simply
wonder whether a less rigidly,
artificially constrained frame-
work in which to evaluate the
brain and its evolution might
not allow these theories and
concepts to be of more use to us.