Journalist for USA Today, Newsweek, Nat'l Geographic, Smithsonian, Author, and
Lecturer at Stanford University

We live in a world of “whiches”—a world where we are asked constantly to choose between two options. Republican or Democrat, religious or scientific, guilty or innocent, we must select which option we prefer, rather than determine what course of action would do the most good. And as Rebecca D. Costa observes in The Watchman’s Rattle, this sort of oppositional choice leads not to progress, but to stagnation. Faced with today’s range of highly complex issues, including war, climate change, economic distress and so many others, our tendency to polarize the range of possibilities into two extreme options stifles insight and creativity, and leads ultimately to gridlock, rather than solutions.

The Watchman’s Rattle is all about solutions to complex problems. Costa sheds fascinating new light on the roadblocks that prevent those solutions, and suggests promising approaches to break through the impasse. She may not have found all the small solutions along the way, but Costa has put her finger firmly on what just might be the big problem: Complexity, and our brains’ inability to keep up. Our world, she argues, has changed far more rapidly than our still-evolving brains have, leaving us stuck at a cognitive threshold, unable to think our way out of ever-more complicated crises and slow-motion catastrophes.

That complexity, and the gridlock and division it breeds, may be the signal characteristic of our age—and that conclusion just might be the one thing our divided society can actually agree upon. But Costa, drawing on advances in fields as diverse as archaeology and cognitive neuroscience—and rooted refreshingly in the central biological fact of evolution—convincingly argues that moments of cognitive gridlock are nothing new in human history. From the collapse of ancient civilizations to the effectiveness of “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”-style advertising, Costa shows how cognitive thresholds shut down our brains’ ability to analyze and synthesize new information, so we start to rely on clarifying beliefs more than rational thought, log jam-busting insight shuts down, and we succumb to the behavioral predispositions that helped keep our ancestors alive in Paleolithic times.

In the face of great complexity, Costa demonstrates, we all-too-easily reject the firm science of evolution and climate change, rush to war when other actions would be more beneficial, and rely on leaders who project strength and embrace identity politics. Above all, we retreat to familiar, secure-seeming belief, the more rock-ribbed, stubborn and unshakeable in the face of contradictory evidence the better.

This phenomenon may be well known, but Costa’s analysis doesn’t stop at crisis, where so many do. By parsing our biological history, she uncovers promising new approaches to solving our most recalcitrant problems.

The human brain evolved for millions of years to get to this point. Will we have to wait millions more to break through the current cognitive threshold—assuming we don’t heat, poison and battle ourselves back to simplicity first? The answer is … well, read on. And don’t skip to the end, either. Costa’s insights and explication are well worth the reading, and she does not leave us only with problems defined and solutions lacking. Who knows, you may even have a breakthrough insight of your own as a result, and add to the diversity of ideas Costa rightly argues we need now desperately. Just don’t keep it to yourself—the rest of us are relying on it now more than ever.