“I like the idea of mental synthesis very much ... I quite agree that language evolved in a way that facilitates synthesis and transmission of the synthesized mental image. ... I don't think there can be much doubt, purely conceptually, that language was a late arrival. Whatever mutation provided the key to it would have had no selectional advantage at all, and would have just been a useless “organ,” if it could not have linked up to pre-existing thought systems.” —...

Introduction While studying the neuroscience of consciousness, I was struck with certain facts about mental imagery that seemed to shed some light on the process of the evolution of the human mind. The origin of the human mind remains one of the greatest mysteries of all times. The last 150 years, since Charles Darwin proposed that species evolve under the influence of natural selection (Darwin C, 1859), have been marked by great discoveries. Molecular biology descri...