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A History of the Human Brain
- From the Sea Sponge to CRISPR, How Our Brain Evolved
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. What saved us during that period of endangerment? The human brain, and its evolutionary journey, is unlike anything else in history.
In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes listeners through that far-reaching journey, showing exactly when and how the human brain evolved to shape who we are today. A History of the Human Brain also tackles the question of where the brain will take us next, exploring the burgeoning concepts of epigenetics and new technologies like CRISPR.
Critic reviews
“A History of the Human Brain is a unique, enlightening, and provocative account of the most significant question we can ask about ourselves.”—Richard Wrangham, author of The Goodness Paradox
“One of the most lucid, clear-eyed, and talented science writers of our time—Bret Stetka—now turns his attention to the evolution of the human brain, taking us on a captivating journey from its origins to the present, enhancing our understanding of how this phenomenal organ and its 100 billion neurons work.”—Eric Topol, MD, author of Deep Medicine
“There are lots of ideas out there about consciousness and the human brain—the untidy product of millions of years of evolution. Bret Stetka comes as close as you could hope to making sense of them in this entertaining and wide-ranging book.”—Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History
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A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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Why Evolution Is True
- By: Jerry A. Coyne
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.
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As great as everyone says it is
- By Joseph on 12-01-10
By: Jerry A. Coyne
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Blueprint
- The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
- By: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Narrated by: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
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Many interesting thoughts
- By Jonas Blomberg Ghini on 06-01-19
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Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
- By: Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Narrated by: Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience.
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slow reader & little bit of a Wokie
- By darren on 06-01-21
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Masters of the Planet
- The Search for Our Human Origins
- By: Ian Tattersall
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.
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Great Book, Some Sloppy Editing
- By DB on 11-23-20
By: Ian Tattersall
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Before the Dawn
- Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings, driven by revelations discovered in the human genome, has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors, the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization.
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Amazing information
- By Albert on 06-15-07
By: Nicholas Wade
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Genesis
- The Deep Origin of Societies
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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Simply awful
- By Mike A Klotz on 02-07-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
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Population Wars
- A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence
- By: Greg Graffin
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations - whether between different species or between rival groups of humans - is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of "the survival of the fittest" explains and often excuses these actions.
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Life Changing Book. No other like it.
- By Abraham R. Herrick-Rough on 05-16-16
By: Greg Graffin
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Human Errors
- A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
- By: Nathan H. Lents
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often - 200 times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake. As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last.
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From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes to...Aliens?
- By Katy.LED on 12-04-18
By: Nathan H. Lents
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The Human Advantage
- A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable
- By: Suzana Herculano-Houzel
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25 percent of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals but not because we are evolutionary outliers.
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Take That Raw Foods!
- By Susie on 07-07-16
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How to Build a Dinosaur
- Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever
- By: Jack Horner, James Gorman
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In movies, in novels, in comic strips, and on television, we've all seen dinosaurs - or at least somebody's educated guess of what they would look like. But what if it were possible to build, or grow, a real dinosaur without finding ancient DNA? Jack Horner, the scientist who advised Steven Spielberg on the blockbuster film Jurassic Park and a pioneer in bringing paleontology into the 21st century, teams up with the editor of the New York Times's Science Times section to reveal exactly what's in store.
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Good book but misplaced title
- By Robert on 06-19-15
By: Jack Horner, and others
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Intelligence in Nature
- An Inquiry into Knowledge
- By: Jeremy Narby
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Anthropologist Jeremy Narby has altered how we understand the Shamanic cultures and traditions that have undergone a worldwide revival in recent years. Now, in one of his most extraordinary journeys, Narby travels the globe - from the Amazon Basin to the Far East - to probe what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all forms of life. Intelligence in Nature presents overwhelming illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone.
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Favorite part was untrue :(
- By Al A'scgh on 08-13-18
By: Jeremy Narby
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We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often - 200 times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake. As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last.
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From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes to...Aliens?
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top notch!
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One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets. Along the way, she interweaves insights from science fiction writers who construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists.
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From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes to...Aliens?
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Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.
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Interesting but thin. ANNOYING narration
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Not a short history of humanity
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A glimpse into the lives of our ancestors.
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The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
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How four tools enabled humanity to control its destiny What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Listeners of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution - a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones - caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time.
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Far too much bias and unsupported conclusions
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Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand
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So much of our world seems to make perfect sense, and scientific breakthroughs have helped us understand ourselves, our planet, and our place in the universe in fascinating detail. But our adventures in space, our deepening understanding of the quantum world, and our leaps in technology have also revealed a universe far stranger than we ever imagined. With brilliant clarity and wit, best-selling author Marcus Chown examines the profound science behind 50 remarkable scientific facts that help explain the vast complexities of our existence.
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Amazing Scientific Facts Clearly Presented
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The Consciousness Instinct
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How do neurons turn into minds? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga puts the latest research in conversation with the history of human thinking about the mind, giving a big-picture view of what science has revealed about consciousness.
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Not recommended
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Human Evolution, 2nd Edition
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The study of human evolution is advancing rapidly. Newly discovered fossil evidence is adding ever more pieces to the puzzle of our past, while revolutionary technological advances in the study of ancient DNA are completely reshaping theories of early human populations and migrations. In this Very Short Introduction, Bernard Wood traces the history of paleoanthropology from its beginnings in the 18th century to the very latest fossil finds.
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Human Evolution: a quick review
- By Kindle Customer on 03-09-23
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The Verge
- Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World
- By: Patrick Wyman
- Narrated by: Patrick Wyman
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.
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Like the Podcast but Better.
- By Michael S. Labrow on 07-21-21
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What listeners say about A History of the Human Brain
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Peter
- 01-23-24
Sterile
This title has little central thesis and nothing new to say. It is largely a survey of more interesting reads.
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- Scott
- 09-14-23
Really Interesting
Interesting and thought provoking.
Great narration. A more modern take on classics like Sagan’s Broca’s Brain.
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- Ladyfish
- 08-23-23
Enjoyable
Very well written, and narrated. Well worth a listen. I’ll be turning my son onto it
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- Jorge Padron
- 12-23-23
Loved it!
Love the way it was written. Easily accessible to someone who isn’t a scientist. My only complaint is the narrator accenting certain words. If that’s what it’s called.
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- Kico M
- 01-29-24
Good one
This is a good book with great insights and curiosities about the brain. The book sometimes go off the trail of the brain and talk about other evolution topics, but at the end can reconnect to the main topic. The scientific info is very well explained and structured.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-04-22
Excellent book
Well researched ad well delivered. Very interesting. I was gripped by this journey that too on us on the history of the human brain.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Avery Dague
- 03-20-21
understanding where our brains came from
First, the narrator did a great job reading, making the book even more interesting.
A concise look at how we got our brains through evolution. Takes the latest known theories and discoveries to tell the interesting, fact based, story of how we humans got our brains.
The book tells us how we got here and alludes to where we may continue. Our understanding and manipulation of our DNA may well provide humans the next evolution of brain enhancement and development.
In 100 years we will know so much more!
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13 people found this helpful
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- Tristan
- 08-09-21
Not a classic, but good.
Nothing too mind blowing here. Just a good, clear book on an interesting subject. Worth a listen.
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21 people found this helpful
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- David L. Daniels
- 09-08-23
A detailed perspective of how our brains evolved
The author pieced together sciences' best evidence of evolutionary impact on our brains. Bravo! It was a grand effort and easy to follow. I've heard the story in bits, but the organized thorough presentation was rewarding to take in. Well worth my time.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Xavier M
- 01-19-24
Great exploration of the brain
It was a masterclass in evolution and history. Fascinating topics and a lively way of learning
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