RAIDERS OF THE LOST POST

 I was all set up to do a philosophical exploration of current developments in brain science, because I'd found some particular post asserting the unique nature of human beings with respect to a positive "need for communication." The article I remembered emphasized that animals did not seem nearly as desperate to communicate precisely because they lacked the human level of abstract thought. But instead of earmarking the article on my own blog, I made passing reference to it on a forum--

-- during the very week when that forum crashed and lost all of the data for that period.

I just blew a couple of hours trying to track down the article based on partial recollections. I found lots of essays asserting the uniqueness of human biological attainments, but nothing that quite placed the same emphasis on the necessity of communication in the terms I remembered. Here's the closest thing I found to the statement I recalled:

Overall, something about the degree and complexity of thought may be what sets humans apart. For example, for all their training, nonhuman apes cannot construct recursive, semantic sentences in which information is embedded within another representational phrase.54 This added complexity, combined with the sheer number of symbols (words) humans can learn, makes for infinite possibilities. Furthermore, while symbolic communication is found throughout the animal kingdom, no other animal, including other apes, has shown the same endless curiosity and propensity to ask questions that comes naturally to a human child.55 Thus, what seems to set human cognition apart is the degree of thought, curiosity, and communication, and the combination of all these skills at once. Yet how such differences may have arisen evolutionarily, and the biological mechanism for this increased complexity, remains to be determined.

Unraveling mechanisms of human brain evolution: Cell

I will probably still write something more on the communication quandary in future. For now, this serves as a bookmark not for the original essay remembered, but for the one thing I found that came close to the desired thing.