Doctor of Neuroscience at the University of California Medical Center, Founder of Posit Science, Inc., Honoree of the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, Pukinje Medal, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, Ipsen Prize and Zulch Prize of the Max-Planck Institute

Philosophical anthropologists have done a reasonable job of explaining to us how our apish makeup accounts for our cognitive abilities and social natures.   Because we humans generally adore ourselves, our primate inheritance has usually been described in the positive terms of that “great leap(s) forward” that separates us from our primate ancestors.   That neurological “next step” enabled everyone’s favorite emergent ability, language – which, in turn, let the culture genie out of the bottle.   Rebecca Costa helps us understand why we are just not smart enough – operating either individually or collectively – to control that genie. 

Because the complexities of modern life are growing at a frenetic pace in a substantially unbridled way, our fundamental neurological limitations for dealing with them are increasingly glaringly exposed.  Costa provides us with clear examples that illustrate the various ways that we have our pants down, when it comes to responding to societal issues that can degrade our lives and literally threaten the survival of our species on Earth.  “Who should we blame?” we ask ourselves, as we identify the many non-addressed problems that are on our own personal “Why isn’t anything (the right thing) being done about this?” list.  “Blame yourself,” Costa tells us. “Blame your brain.”

She’s right, of course. 

The revelation that our neurobehavioral limitations for dealing with complexity distorts and frustrates true societal progress is hardly news.   Human history provides us with rich and appalling testimony about our fundamental personal and collective inadequacies for dealing with complexity.  Contemporary neuroscience has richly confirmed a second key contributor to our failure to cope that is perfectly obvious in that record:  There is only a weak correlation between our self-confidence about what we know to be accurate or true or “right”, and the truth itself.  Across human history, individual and collective errors in judgment in complex human societies are a natural plague that has been with us from the outset.  It is important to understand that most of those errors have been generated in brains that are operating with very high degrees of confidence.  Our problem with complexity does not just stem from a lack of an ability to understand its landscapes.  They also arise from a brain that misinforms almost every one of us that we “know” the truth about thousands of matters that are actually far beyond our understanding.   Ask the average citizen of the world about societal issues (“Are videogames good for kids?”  “Is climate change attributable to human activities?”) and most will have an immediate “yes” or “no” answer, expressed with a substantial degree of confidence.  On the basis of their actual knowledge, that confidence is a neurological trick.  It is rarely justified.

This neurological self-deception richly colors the records of our history, where, with just a little ‘smoothing’, we operate with an over-riding spirit of societal self-congratulation.  Cultures advance.  Change is good.  Life is better.  We progress from “primitive” and “old-fashioned” to “advanced” and “modern”.  “New” trumps “old”, almost every time.  Costa does a good job of reminding us that societal change does not equate with individual human or societal progress.  She explains how levels of complexity that only the specialist can even begin to understand (and only in their domain) can confound any accurate societal value judgment.   “Being informed” means that each one of us is expected to make an “intelligent judgment” about many complex issues.   In the swamp of complexity in which we find ourselves, there is obviously just too damn much to know.

Indeed, perhaps you should ask your brain how it feels about all this change.  While you’re at it, you might ask it about how successfully it’s been loading itself up with those millions of ‘facts’ that are required to control the billions of associations that might be called for to control truly logical operations.  After all, its changes (expressed collectively in the billions of brains on our planet) ARE the cultural explosion that that we’re all experiencing.   That brain that is you was designed for different, simpler times.  It evolved to enable a rapid construction of a model of the real world, and to control the far simpler range of possible actions in that world (with teamwork, as a member of a social species) that assured survival.  Your brain hasn’t had such an easy time of it. Modern humans must go through a long period of didaction to master the very complicated set of skills and abilities that install a brief synopsis of human cultural advance from the beginning of cultural development up to the present day.  Your brain – the person that you are – is a product of that massive brain re-modeling enterprise.  By any objective standards, it is a remarkably distorted operational machine, when contrasted with the functional brain of our earlier human ancestors. After all, YOU spend the majority of the waking hours of your life engaged in behaviors that did not apply for the average individual a thousand years ago.  You read facilely; have a general understanding of operations and principles of mathematics; manipulate a keyboard and pencil to record and express and manipulate external and mental information at high speed; have developed general abilities for complex problem solving; can control a several thousand pound machine moving in the environment of other similar machines, all moving at high speed; can respond to the requirements of an information search or interactive ‘game’ with high accuracy and speed; can control 30 or 40 machines that are more complicated in their rules of operation that almost any machine that existed a millennium ago; among many other examples. 

In every one of these activities, mastery of these abilities has been achieved through brain specialization.  The brain of the reader or musician or tennis player or driver or mathematical problem solver or golfer or keyboard user has constructed function systems that are NOT to be found in the brain of the non-reader/non-musician/non-athlete/non-driver/non-mathematical problem solver non-golfer.  Your brain can spend most of a day in the never-never land of abstraction, in an environment in which almost nothing that you see or feel or hear is “real”.  Your world is paved and predictable.  Your world is chock full of a million and one tools.  Your world is painted, dressed, climate-control, danger-controlled, sterilized.  Your world is very complicated.  Your brain is filled to the brim with a million and one ‘facts’ associated in a billion and one ways that were in no one’s thousand-years-ago Wiki.  Your brain is overwhelmed by the complexities of the world that the human brain collective has created through a hundred thousand years of effort. 

With deep insights into the neurology that shapes, limits and ultimately frustrates human individuals and societies, Costa raises obvious questions that keep this brain scientist up late at night:  What societal changes are good for us as individuals?  What changes are driving the brains of our populations in positive and empowering – or negative and degrading – directions?  How on earth can we hope to bring the genie back under any kind of sensible control?  How can we evolve a society that is good for US?

Costa correctly identifies a possible path out of the swamp.  It would help, one has to believe, if every citizen of our world really understood their true human natures.  This book should help every reader understand their proper place in the world – operating thereafter, one might hope, with just a little greater humility!  An understanding of our very human natures that limit true understanding is surely the first small step toward growing this precious resource. 

Costa also points out that there is a real potential for us all to operate with higher “intelligence” as it might apply for growing stronger and more effectively organized societies.  After all, we modern humans are remarkably elaborate in our neurological specialization.  Great further strengthening and elaboration, achieved through perhaps our greatest human asset, our remarkably ‘plastic’ brains, is clearly achievable.  Perhaps more importantly, our remarkably adaptive brains could be far more effectively shaped in ways designed to grow changes in modern cultures that assure better societal outcomes.   We CAN grow altruism and compassion in human societies.  We CAN substantially increase the abilities of every citizen to more accurately record the information that we require, to make “more intelligent” decisions that can shape our destinies.  Finally, science and the machines of science can be “smarter” than we are, because they can be constructed to operate more objectively, on the bases of far larger compendias of ‘facts’.  

In the progress of human culture, we Homo sapiens have always muddled through.  The stakes are rising.  The genie is enormous. It is scarcely paying any attention to our nervous twittering.  Rebecca Costa has provided us with a starting point for elevating our view, to look it squarely in the eye.