THE NEED FOR DATA REDUCTION MAY HAVE PAVED THE WAY FOR THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE ABILITY IN HOMINIDS

The increasing size of the hominid brain during its evolution must have posed increasing demands on the brain's data management and data reduction systems. Any loss in efficiency in coping with increasing amounts of data would negate any advantages gained by an increase in size. Therefore a reorganization of the data management systems must have become necessary. This could have been achieved by replication of the structures responsible for data reduction as part of the brain's expansion, and a new coupling between them. Serial coupling, rather than the parallel coupling which would be the simplest result of replicative expansion, would produce a reiterative processing system which could develop new abilities although the individual operations stay the same. One such ability is that of deriving "neural symbols", the reduction or abstraction of data down to a form which allows easy transfer amongst the different parts of the brain. The use of neural symbols would free large amounts of working space and so would open possibilities for new computations. A brain which has undergone this reorganization can gain, rather than lose, in performance as it becomes larger. The new ability of forming neural symbols and also that of sequencing them are prerequisites for, and must precede the evolution of language. © 1991 Academic Press Limited.