Précis of How the brain got language: The Mirror System Hypothesis

Abstract

The short answer to the question of How the Brain Got Language is “through biological and cultural evolution.” The challenge is to be more specific. I use the term “the language-ready brain” to suggest that the brain of early Homo sapiens was adequate to support language but that it required tens of millennia for humans to be able to exploit these innate neural capabilities to develop, cumulatively, languages and the societies that made languages possible and necessary. The ability to surf the World Wide Web is a recent example of society's expanding ability to develop technologies and social structures which allow humans to exploit their neural capabilities in ways that were not part of the adaptive pressures for biological evolution.The two-fold challenge of the book, then, is to understand (i) what are the mechanisms of the language-ready brain and what adaptive pressures evolved them biologically; and (ii) how did those mechanisms support the emergence of language as well as modern-day patterns of language change, acquisition and use, and the social interactions which support them?