How can we expect to cope well in the high-tech, heavily populated, concrete maze of twenty-first-century life with a brain that evolved within the heads of isolated bands of prehistoric hunter-gatherers? So much is different now. Most of us don't have to worry about being eaten by large predators or spend our days scouring the wilderness for calories. We mostly sit and stare at phones, computer screens, and televisions. How has our ancestor's brain held up so well in such a radically different environment from what we knew for 99.999 percent of our existence? One answer to that is that we are not coping so well these days. Mental-health problems, poverty, drug addiction, crime, wars, terrorism, food-related diseases, and death by stress are all common features of the contemporary landscape.

Interesting....this is an approach I hadn't thought about with the increasingly higher incidences of mental illnesses...

Learning about the brain does seem pretty damned important. As the Greeks said, know thyself. Without an understanding of our brain's tendency towards bias and irrationality, we will continue to make mistakes in many areas of life. Certainyl most of those errors are inevitable, but maybe occasionally, with a brief moment of reflection, we can make better choices.

Guy Harrison wrote:This is why it is so important for us to work at becoming good thinkers. To drift through existence without understanding the brain or developing critical-thinking skills is to live an undervalued life.

Good stuff.

It's helpful to have at least a few people around you to be your mental workout buddy. They will keep you in check, challenge your assumptions, and point out when you're potentially biased. I have a few friends that do this and it's invaluable. We're all amazingly blind, and it helps to know someone who isn't turned off by correcting or being corrected in good thinking.

Interbane wrote:It's helpful to have at least a few people around you to be your mental workout buddy. They will keep you in check, challenge your assumptions, and point out when you're potentially biased. I have a few friends that do this and it's invaluable. We're all amazingly blind, and it helps to know someone who isn't turned off by correcting or being corrected in good thinking.

(Laughing) My wife is always willing to check my assumptions and point out when I'm potentially biased (wrong).

Where do brains come from? Atheists!
It's surprising how many avowedly atheistic websites use an image of a human brain as their logo. That and the landlubber fish.
Theists have souls but it doesn't work as a logo.

Flann wrote:Theists have souls but it doesn't work as a logo.

It helps if it's something real.

Interbane wrote:Flann wrote:
Theists have souls but it doesn't work as a logo.




It helps if it's something real.

Thoughts are real and they're not material things. I haven't read Guy's book so am not really commenting seriously. Just an odd thought about brains.

Flann wrote:Thoughts are real and they're not material things.

You win.

oops, double posting

brother bob wrote:He walks a line that is not logical and never seems to show support other than other kooks who make such bodacious and unsubstantiated claims.

Brother Bob, thanks for your comments. Much of this chapter is understood to be very speculative. We simply don't know the conditions that gave rise to the hominid big brain and its capacity to reason. But knowing what we know from fossil evidence, a question emerges. "Out of all the life-forms on Earth, why us? Of the mammals, the other primates, and the extinct human species, why Homo sapiens?"

Our brains have tripled in size over the last seven million years, and most of that expansion occurred in just the last two million years. Two million years may seem like a long time to you and me, but in the big picture that's fast. Based on fossil evidence, our ancestors experienced a huge leap in brain size somewhere between 2 and 1.5 million years ago. Then another jump occurred between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago. . . . This change was not only about bigger brains, however. The hominin brain was becoming more complex, too. Evolution was selecting for higher thought, more abstract thinking and, of course, language. We had transitioned from almost purely instinctual creatures to reasoning, planning people who increased their chances of survival and reproduction by thinking their way through challenges and then sharing solutions and discoveries with one another. . . .

Harrison then discusses some of the hypotheses that have been bandied about in recent decades that may account for the jump in brain size and thinking ability. Such speculations can be very interesting. But it's important to understand that they are speculations.

brother bob wrote:He even concludes the chapter that for 100,000 years the DNA inside of us has generated that the same being reproduced. pg. 74 . . . So he spends all of this time and energy claiming that our brain came from millions of species over billions of years, but for the last 100,000 years we put a halt to the evolutionary process by reproducing the same being, with the same brain. It seems he is making this up as he goes! He plays both sides of the fence and you guys take it in wholeheartedly without any questions from my observations so far, and for the most part.

In evolutionary time, 100,000 years is nothing, certainly a very short time span compared to the billions of years that came before. Harrison's point here is that most of our evolution took place during conditions that were very different from the modern landscape. We are are well suited for conditions as they were 100,000 years ago. This is a very human dilemma because only humans have the power to so dramatically change our environment. And that change seems to be happening at an ever-increasing pace (although we don't have hoverboards yet).