Abstract
In humans, the reuse of neural structure is particularly pronounced at short, task-relevant timescales. Here, an argument is developed for the claim that facts about neural reuse at task-relevant timescales conflict with at least one characterization of neural reuse at an evolutionary timescale. It is then argued that, in order to resolve the conflict, we must conceptualize evolutionary-scale reuse more abstractly than has been generally recognized. The final section of the paper explores the relationship between neural reuse and human nature. It is argued that neural reuse is not well-described as a process that constrains our present cognitive capacities. Instead, it liberates those capacities from the ancestral tethers that might otherwise have constrained them.
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Notes
- 1.
In this prosaic example, there is no deep truth about which functions are genuinely distinct, because the individuation conditions for the functions of a coffee mug are, presumably, a matter of convention rather than discovery.
- 2.
To see this, consider how difficult it is to design an experiment that might serve to falsify the claim that “x is a representation,” where x is any pattern of neural activity you choose.
- 3.
Although this claim has recently been disputed, in light of new data. See Kim et al. (2017).
- 4.
Although see Coltheart (2014) for a somewhat deflationary interpretation of the degree of positional robustness that is actually licensed by the neuroimaging data.
- 5.
The anthropological data Dehaene offers as evidence of neural reuse may be not as straightforward as he sometimes makes it sound. Max Coltheart has argued that the uniformity to which Dehaene refers is simply not there (Coltheart 2014). I am sympathetic to Coltheart’s concerns about the evidence, but would like to resist Dehaene’s account on different grounds altogether. I will therefore just assume the evidence says exactly what Dehaene says it does.
- 6.
If you want to study the site at which the VWFA will appear in the brains of children who are currently pre-literate, you have to guess where it will appear in the future. Individual variability imposes a relatively low ceiling on the accuracy of such guesses. The Dehaene-Lambertz et al. (2018) study is the first to overcome this methodological difficulty.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Matteo Colombo, Philipp Haueis, and Lena Kästner for insightful feedback on my Neural Mechanisms Online talk, which was my first attempt to work out the issues discussed in this chapter.
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Rathkopf, C. (2021). Neural Reuse and the Nature of Evolutionary Constraints. In: Calzavarini, F., Viola, M. (eds) Neural Mechanisms. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54092-0_9
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