The 41st Annual Meeting of the J.B. Johnston Club for Evolutionary Neuroscience and the 33rd Annual Karger Workshop in Evolutionary Neuroscience

The 2021 meetings of the J.B. Johnston Club for Evolutionary Neuroscience and Karger Workshop in Evolutionary Neuroscience is typically held immediately before the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This year the Karger Workshop will be held on Thursday, November 11. The regular JBJC meeting will be held on Friday, November 12. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both meetings will be held virtually. This year’s Karger Workshop in Evolutionary Neuroscience, made possible by the continuing support of Karger Publishers, is organized by Loreta Medina and Ester Desfilis. It is titled “Conservation, divergence and convergence in amygdala evolution”. The Workshop will examine new findings about some controversial issues of this complex brain structure that in mammals is known to be critical for regulating emotions, social behavior and cognition, but whose identification in non-mammals and the evolution thereof have been highly a matter of vivid discussion. The workshop participants treat the subject from various perspectives that introduce the expression of the amygdala in different species of vertebrates and consider distinct developmental and evolutionary mechanisms. On the following day, the program for the annual JBJC meeting will consist of 24 talks submitted by JBJC members and selected by the JBJC Program Committee (Werner Graf, Alice Powers, Andrew Iwaniuk). Additional information and the final schedule of talks will be mailed to JBJC members before the meeting and posted on the JBJC web site (www.jbjclub.org).

Carl Jung and the Psychedelic Brain

In this essay, I outline an approach to analytical psychology based on the emerging disciplines of psychedelic neuroscience and psychedelic assisted therapies. During the 1950s Jung made brief comments on the use of psychedelics in traditional cultures and therapeutic contexts. I analyse these comments in the light of consequent research in the field. Contemporary psychedelic researchers are achieving impressive results in the treatment of mental illness and various forms of existential distress. A number of theories have been proposed to explain these results. In this essay, I will explore the idea that psychedelics facilitate a transition from our recently evolved secondary consciousness associated with the default mode network, to a more affect-based form of primary consciousness. I will also apply these findings to ethnographic accounts of traditional psychedelic use in Africa and Latin America, highlighting the usefulness of a Jungian approach to this material informed by psychedelic and evolutionary neuroscience.

What Behavioral Abilities Emerged at Key Milestones in Human Brain Evolution? 13 Hypotheses on the 600-Million-Year Phylogenetic History of Human Intelligence

This paper presents 13 hypotheses regarding the specific behavioral abilities that emerged at key milestones during the 600-million-year phylogenetic history from early bilaterians to extant humans. The behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive faculties of humans are complex and varied: we have abilities as diverse as map-based navigation, theory of mind, counterfactual learning, episodic memory, and language. But these faculties, which emerge from the complex human brain, are likely to have evolved from simpler prototypes in the simpler brains of our ancestors. Understanding the order in which behavioral abilities evolved can shed light on how and why our brains evolved. To propose these hypotheses, I review the available data from comparative psychology and evolutionary neuroscience.

Characterising the Behaviour of the Ctenophore Pleurobrachia pileus in a Laboratory Aquaculture System

Neurobiological research focuses on a small number of model organisms, broadening the pool of animals used in research may lead to important insights into the evolution of nervous systems. The ctenophore is emerging as a promising model, but we are currently lacking an understanding into the relationship between behaviour and environment which is in part due to a lack of a standardised long-term laboratory husbandry system. We established a collection and husbandry system for wild caught Pleurobrachia pileus. We examined the behavioural profile of the animals over time in this controlled environment. We could reliably catch them on a seasonal basis, and we could keep the animals alive in our specialised aquarium system for months at a time. P. pileus spends most of the time in an inactive ‘drifting’ state which is interspersed with periods of one of 5 active behaviours. The most common active behaviours are tentacle resetting and feeding. The longest duration behaviours include swimming up or down. Time of day does not appear to alter their behavioural profile. Gaining a better understanding of the behaviour of these animals has important implications for systems and evolutionary neuroscience.