The book considers how the brain and genes evolved into their present condition over the course of thousands and millions of years.

The book argues that the earlier ape brain had evolved “mindmakers” and that the human mind arose when these were “rewired” by symbols.

[1] p. 277 Mindware itself has been evolving for the last 120,000 years and as a result kept reshaping human consciousness, thought and culture.

It was the highly cooperative sociability of humans that allowed gifted environments to arise that could fully support cognitive development.

Humans in contrast have journeyed away from being simple hunter-gatherers to becoming citizens of hi-tech nation states.

This raises the question of what had evolved, the ticket, in those early humans that gave them to the potential to change later on so radically.

This space allows novel intermediary forms of association to be created and held together between different information processing systems in the brain.

The anterior cingulate cortex is argued to act as a “hidden observer” over what we do “attention-to-action” and it provides a similar function for humans.

Limbic symbolons are symbols that enable emotional attachments established in other apes by smell, grooming and to some degree sight, to cope with physical separation by an internal (mental name) or external (wedding ring) stand-in that is always cognitively present.

[25] “Early hominid environments were dangerous and food resources patchy and irregular, which placed a premium on individuals able to exploit kin relations and extend social links beyond the immediate present.

Such pressures promoted symbolism, originally to stand for kin recognition and social relationships, enabling these to be maintained over time and space even when the relevant individuals were absent.

These developments in turn lead to more complex social networks and the cognitive abilities to exploit these.”[26] Two kinds of sociability exist: immediate and nonimmediate.

They are clues to understanding such things as our freedom and the links between the prefrontal cortex’s inner cues and our hidden sociability’”.

They also provide the neural substrate for cultural symbolism and so the human ability to sustain socially defined groups and personal bonds.

[32] In mindware “the human ape found a brain programming language to bond across time and place—symbolic culture.

[38] Humans are social primates who use superficial differences (such as skin pigmentation) or symbols based upon ancient myth to identify their group membership.

Brains offer a firmer foundation for our identity since they underlie the core of who we are in our shared “vulnerability, richness, history, and giftedness”.

It follows that “Each of our brains should be guaranteed the right to grow unhandicapped and supplied with the best possible nurture and support”,[39] and “a gifted environment sensitive to its uniqueness”.