ABSTRACT
Reflectivity has proven to be the quintessential tool for understanding and to a degree controlling daily life. Both chimpanzees and humans possess conscious awareness, but humans use their conscious abilities more consistently, more flexibly and in many more ways than do chimpanzees. This chapter discusses when and why this difference might have arisen and how Reflectivity-related Well-Being Systems became central to the evolution of humans. It also discusses the evolution and significance of culture, expectations and language. Language enabled early humans to maximize the benefits afforded by Reflectivity at not only the individual cognitive level but also at the sociocultural level. The performance of language is fundamentally a social act, it requires a deep understanding of the social context, which in turn suggests, as appears to be true, that Relationality-related Well-Being Systems, Reflectivity-related Well-Being Systems and language all need to be neurologically tightly interconnected.
