Reason and Other Ways of Knowing: Our Evolutionary Heritage Thomas S. Ray. For hundreds of millions of years before the modern mind appeared, evolution meticulously developed many ways of knowing the world through the senses. These methods are still effective today. Each mode of cognition is mediated by a "mental organ" - a population of neurons carrying a receptor for a specific neurotransmitter (for example: serotonin-7, histamine-1, alpha-2C). Each mental organ gives a special touch to our life. The mind developed along with the affective area that existed before it, and was created to work with the affective component of the information received. When the mind achieves dominance at the cost of losing contact with other modes of knowledge, we gain the ability to manipulate nature, but at the same time we do not understand the essence of these processes, and are not able to draw wise conclusions.