At first blush our brains are incredibly lazy. Even if the old adage that we only use 10% of it were true it would only seem to be because the other 90% has no desire to get off the couch. When I look at all the ways our minds deceive us, the shortcuts in logic, our problems with misperception how can I not wonder why we forget our keys in the door, our glasses on our head, miss the gorilla dancing through the frame. Why would this be so? Why haven’t we evolved more acute powers of observation? Why can’t we all behave as though we’re on our NZT-48 (Limitless, a better concept than movie but now streaming on Netflix anyway) all the time? How come we cannot comprehend more information, why do we make such obvious mistakes? This is not a new question and answering it would require far longer than the scope of this article, but it’s important to remember that we are way closer to our Cro-Magnon ancestors than we like to admit. It is not our minds that are lazy so much as evolution is efficient in changing as little as possible while ensuring our survival.
Consider how the evolution of our consciousness must have proceeded – it wasn’t as though we magically woke up endowed with the powers we have today. No, more likely we picked up exactly and only what we needed to survive, expanding our inner space as our increasing comfort and safety allowed. It makes some pretty basic sense that being endowed with the concept for division doesn’t help when the mammoth is bearing down on you and your flint and hide spear. More likely we acquired our concept of numbers from pack hunting, matching the number of animals to be hunted or planning coverage tactics and developing more abstract operations only as we had the leisure to ponder in safety. I would love to know exactly the steps between learning to count and developing currency systems, the evolution of mind had to occur. I hope one day we can at least construct such a timeline but in the meanwhile it’s at least important to point out that for a long stretch of our evolution having additional cognitive powers doesn’t provide nearly the advantage that being able to swing a club more ably than everyone else would.
Remember though that while our conscious cognition may be often severely lacking it is only because of the limitations of our conscious mind in relation to amount of sense data that is available to be perceived. We take in about two million bits of information but can only consciously process 134 bits per second. That’s a serious issue of scope and quite the burden for any mind to consider. It’s also the most likely the reason why our conscious mind is so terrible with willpower and attention; we’re so busy dealing with the other two million (.0067%) bits how can we possibly expect to right even most of the time? I’m amazed that we’ve progressed as a society as far as we have and removes some of the surprise I get when I read Literally Unbelievable; still entertaining, just less surprising.
And that’s just the information coming through our senses, saying nothing of the internal processes that we take for granted. Consider how difficult it is to control your breath, a feature that is at once both automatic and within our conscious control. As any beginning meditator or yogin (or just someone upset) can tell you simply breathing with some control is one of the most difficult things to do on command. But that isn’t all your mind is always responsible for; it also digests your food, beats your heart, filters your impurities and regulates your body temperature among the countless other things you do without realizing it. It’s not a far leap then to realize that more likely our cognitive abilities were carved out as best as our adaptation allowed – we’ve always been working at capacity, it just so happens that we’ve managed to get efficient enough to allow some behavior that we think we control above and beyond the old fight or flight.
Basically nature made us extremely flawed, but good enough as a group to make everything that we see before us. What we perceive as an actively thinking mind is for most if not all of us as primal as we can possibly possess while still living and growing hair. As mentioned in the brilliant movie Waking Life the difference between Aristotle and common man is grater than the difference between common man the ape. It may sound inflammatory but really makes some painful intuitive sense: since we’re operating near capacity at each waking moment, it stands to reason that such deviations in prowess from the average are the exception rather than the rule.
Our failures in cognition are perhaps even less surprising when you consider how poorly we reason under stress (see the phenomenon of Controlled Flight into Terrain) or in emotional circumstances. Suffice it for today to remember just how primal we actually are and in actuality just how few resources we have allocated in our minds for reason and logic. When you figure in issues such as habitual behaviors (created to free up cognitive space) and brain damage from environment, injury or consumption it makes so much more sense to praise effort rather than outcome. We succeed despite our wiring, not because of it, which is something to remember the next time your frustration at ineptitude surfaces; we’re all in the same kind of badly built glass house.
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