How did the human mind emerge through the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, useful autonomy, language, and the capability to think, to comprehend itself as well as the world? With this quantity in the Essential Understanding series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise explanation of the evolutionary discovery that developed the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the about The Conscious Brain sequence of events where Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He represents the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent brain — a fresh (‘off-line’) internal response program with that your brain accesses itself and forms a selection mechanism for emotionally generated behavior choices. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, clarifies how the pet brain’s ‘understanding’ became self-accessible and reflective — that’s, how the human brain acquired a mindful mind. Consciousness, unlike pet awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey’s account shows how protolanguage advanced into language, how a human brain subsystem for the emergent brain was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain’s functional autonomy, he argues, as free of charge will. Torey proposes that once life began, awareness had to emerge — because awareness may be the informational source of the brain’s behavioral response. Awareness, he argues, isn’t a newly acquired ‘quality,’ ‘cosmic basic principle,’ ‘circuitry set up,’ or ‘epiphenomenon,’ as others possess argued, but an indispensable working element of the living system’s manner of working.