Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (6 page)

It is precisely for this reason that Caveman Logic and Stone Age thinking should be viewed with disdain. Those Pleistocene default modes with their mental and perceptual shortcuts are the very essence of “being controlled.” They amount to nothing less than relinquishing control of your mental equipment to a brutish, clueless, fearful caveman. It may not feel that way, but you have turned over the reins to an inferior being. You simply cannot take pride in being in control of your own destiny at the same time you have handed the strings over to a prehistoric puppeteer.

There is no way to overstate how the architecture of the human brain sets limits on the beliefs we generate and share. The strongest reading of this view is offered by Noam Chomsky; it says simply that if we humans did not share brain architecture, culture could not exist. It is those hardwired modular circuits common to the brain of every human, regardless of his or her race, religion, or geographical home, that make culture possible. If we each had unique blank-slate bits of brain tissue in our skulls, allowing all our uniqueness to emerge each day, it is doubtful we would get together long enough to mate, much less form productive social groups.

Occasionally, you’ll find a neurological outsider—someone like Albert Einstein—whose inferior parietal lobe was 15 percent wider than normal. The result was an exceptional person, a bit of a social klutz who didn’t do well in school but who effortlessly saw connections between mathematical and spatial entities in a way unlike those around him. The result was breakthroughs in theoretical physics or mathematics. Most ordinary people labeled Einstein as a genius, although the case can be made that he wasn’t any smarter (whatever that means) than most people. Indeed, he may not have worked any harder than most. He simply “got it.” He understood aspects of the universe that few others did. Even when Einstein’s ideas and perceptions were expressed in everyday language, it took mental effort for his normal colleagues to grasp those relationships. The standard-issue Pleistocene brain is not geared for such rarified skills. If Einstein’s anatomical mutation had been present 100,000 years ago, it’s uncertain whether it would have been favored by natural selection. One thing is for sure: if Einstein’s mind were the norm, culture as we know it would be quite different.

The culture that emerges from our shared mental equipment is impressively diverse, but even more impressive than its diversity are its similarities. To this day, I have undergraduates who argue that we are what (or who) we are because of culture. Incredibly, they have spent very little time looking at the question of where culture, itself, comes from. To many, it is simply
there
. It predates us and acts to determine our behavior. Such a view tends to debiologize human beings by turning them into purely social beings, unfazed by the biological imperatives that operate on every other form of life on the planet.

Once we accept that culture—which surely does influence human behavior—is, itself, an outgrowth of the human mind, we begin to see a bigger, more consistent pattern to life on our planet. The human body was designed through a painstaking and value-neutral process of natural selection. All of our organs evolved in this manner, including our brains. The human mind, like the human foot or eye, is common to all members of our species. Several friends of mine joined Doctors Without Borders and traveled to remote portions of the globe, bringing modern medicine to people who had been without it perhaps forever. Consider the obvious: These doctors did not worry about taking special courses in the anatomy of the third world eye or foot or spleen in order to practice in these culturally remote locations. They knew those organs would be the same, even in the most exotic locations.

So, too, with the human brain. It does its job in the same way in remote locations. It provides the same perceptual and logical shortcuts everywhere it works. It also sets the user up for the same perceptual and logical distortions everywhere it goes. The
content
of those irrational conclusions and delusions will probably differ from place to place, but their essential nature and their effects on us will be startlingly similar wherever we go.

You will not find a lot of books touting the flaws of the human mind. On the contrary, there is a market for singing the praises of virtually every organ and structure of our bodies. There are tributes to the nose, the ear, the eye, and the hand. Even the lowly knee draws praise. The human heart? Whether literally or metaphorically, there are books that rhapsodize over its engineering and its resilience. But in all this body boasting, there is no winner greater than the brain. On that one, most authors simply stand back in wonder, listing accomplishments of human ingenuity and drawing comparisons to “lower species” that, despite sharing large portions of chromosomal material with us, seem to hit their peak when they can manage to use a stick as a tool to extract dinner from a termite mound. In most ways, the mental competition out there is pretty shoddy. We are the clear winners. The human mind with its wondrous abilities trumps all pretenders in the known universe. And so we have the spectacle of the human mind singing the praises of the human mind.

Who in their right mind would disagree? Who would criticize the mind? And on what basis? Prepare yourself: We’re about to do just that. As my grandmother might have said, “What? We’re not smart enough for you?”

I’d like to keep my grandmother in the discussion. I do so with no disrespect intended to grandmothers anywhere, least of all my own. Having this imaginary debate with my grandmother will focus my effort on the “common sense” opposition to what I say, as well as forcing me to think clearly and express myself in a nontechnical manner.

And so . . . no, Nana. It’s not that we’re not smart enough. That’s not the trouble. We are very, very smart. The problem is, some of that “smart” isn’t done quite the way you might have imagined. It’s done through “shortcuts.” Scientists call them
heuristics
. When these heuristics are working the way they were designed to under the conditions they were designed for, they are astoundingly good.

The trouble is that what these heuristics do best isn’t just accuracy. It’s accuracy with high speed and very low cost.

Yes. Everything we do and everything that’s part of us has a cost/benefit trade-off. The brain is an expensive thing to run. It takes more energy than any other part of our bodies. Anything our bodies do has got to be efficient. If a particular job isn’t really helping, it may get phased out altogether. Remember those TV documentaries about fish that live in the dark and eventually lose their eyes? You just don’t need them deep down in the ocean. Even if the job is important but it requires too many calories to do, there’s pressure to get it done more efficiently.

Call it natural selection. The most ruthless efficiency expert that ever was.

No, Nana. I love the human mind. It lets us do what we’re doing right now, you and I, which is wonderful. But the mind also has some real problems, and they have a lot to do with all those efficient shortcuts.

Well, think about how shortcuts work. First of all, they aren’t 100 percent effective. If they work more often than not, or enough to produce
relative
success, that may be good enough for natural selection.

The thing is, Nana, natural selection and I have different “agendas,” if you can use that word. I’m concerned with more than just survival and reproduction and moving genes into the next generation. I’m thinking about “quality of life” issues, like being smart and undeluded and clearheaded and informed. Natural selection is blind to those kinds of qualities, and to a lot more that many people think are important aspects of human life.

Being right or seeing something correctly 70 percent of the time may be good enough to get some software into the next generation, but it still results in a lot of faulty perception. What if some of those mental mistakes start to receive social support? What if people
bond
around those mistakes that their minds frequently make in interpreting the world?

All the time, Nana. And that’s under the best of conditions. Remember that these shortcuts work best under the particular conditions for which they were designed. That’s where natural selection did its work. What if the conditions have changed enough so that the shortcut is still triggered, but now the results are even less likely to be correct? Our minds don’t deliver a written disclaimer saying, “The conclusion you are about to reach may not be accurate. The image you think you see may actually be something else. In fact, it may be nothing at all. You could end up being entirely wrong. Sorry. I was really not designed to handle
this
situation for you. I’m at my best under slightly different conditions and even then, I do tend to get it wrong from time to time. It’s part of why I was chosen. I’m quick and inexpensive.”

That’s not a bad analogy, Nana.

That might help, but it’s not how most of us conduct our business. Even worse, that second opinion is likely to come from another human who has just received the same faulty information. Now there are two of you and it’s even harder to get you to question your conclusions.

A few reasons, Nana. First, natural selection moves very slowly and can only choose among alternatives. Second, you have to think about the costs of being wrong under these conditions. Remember, natural selection isn’t necessarily looking for “smart” or “accurate” or “nondelusional.” It’s concerned with survival and reproduction. So what if you see a face in the clouds that isn’t there? You still get to have dinner and make babies. If the guy in the next cave sees the same face, maybe you can be friends. Buddies with a shared delusion. He might even help you if you get attacked or if you run out of food for your kids. There’s not much to lose by making a whole bunch of mistakes about the world around you.

But consider the alternative. What if we realized there are no faces in the clouds. What if we get it
right
about nothing being there, but as part of the bargain we occasionally miss seeing someone or something that really
was
there?
That
kind of mistake might be fatal. That’s not a good recipe for reproductive success. You can see how natural selection would have a very different response toward that kind of perceptual system. It may be less deluded, but it’s also less likely to survive.

That’s exactly what I’m saying, Nana. And if you read the rest of this book, I’ll try to be fair about the good we got. But I’ll also spend more time than usual talking about the bad we got, what it might be costing us, and how we can remedy the situation.

I
t is important to see your mind or, for that matter, your brain, as you do any organ in your body. It has a particular job to do and it has evolved slowly over millions of years to do that job. Your heart pumps blood; your lungs aerate blood; your liver and kidneys filter impurities from the blood; your ears respond to pressure changes in the atmosphere and relay them so your brain can process and interpret them. These are specialized functions and they are in no way interchangeable. In a pinch, your spleen could not stand in for your heart or your lungs. Organs have evolved under strict selection pressure to do highly specific jobs.

Your brain is just one more organ, subject to the same rules and limitations as any other part of your body. Its job, broadly speaking, is to process and store information and instigate bodily movements that are efficient and cost-effective. Given the complexity of what the brain does, that is a barely adequate description. The important thing to remember is that the brain is highly modularized. It is
not
a general-purpose computer that was a blank slate at birth, waiting for your personal experiences and inputs from your culture to write upon its empty pages. That kind of description hasn’t passed muster with neuropsychologists for well over a half century.

Each of those modules can boast a long natural history and a lot of selection pressure. When I bought the laptop computer on which I’ve written much of this book, it came with preinstalled software. Thankfully, I didn’t have to create or even install the programs. In fact most new computers are ready to operate right out of the box. You can start downloading music, writing essays, manipulating digital images, and e-mailing friends as soon as you plug in your computer. The human brain, although it too becomes a spectacular information processor and manipulator, takes many years to develop, much like the rest of the body. Granted, it will go through a lot of stages en route to full capacity, but the nature of that software is pretty well determined if not at the moment of conception, then surely by birth.

Those mental modules that we prize so highly served our ancestors well. But because they are so highly specialized they are also capable of some dramatic and often humorous mistakes. This is the price you pay for highly specialized software. It can save you time and calories when environmental conditions match the ones it was designed to handle. But when the match is off or that software gets triggered inappropriately, stand back! You’re going to see, do, or believe some pretty outrageous things. Worse yet, you may not have a clue just how off-base those things are. There’s also a good chance the person standing beside you will be experiencing a similar cognitive glitch or veering toward the same delusion.