I congratulate you for getting all the way to the end of this long hyper-document (I’m assuming you didn’t skip to this page.) Now it is time to put all the pieces together.
Thinking began when animals developed vision so that they could sense their environment. Its function at first was to make the connection between seeing something and doing something about it: approach it if edible, flee if dangerous. Nervous systems slowly grew in size and complexity for millions of years. The next fundamental change was the development of sequential processing systems, which proved to be metabolically expensive. This was followed by the simultaneous development of play and learning.
