Category: human nature

23rd July 2020

Apparently one of the best known models for understanding the structure of the brain was developed by Paul Maclean in the 1960’s. Although thinking around it has developed and moved on, his essential idea is that we have ‘three types of brain’ that have appeared in succession as we have evolved. 

• Firstly the Reptilian brain which controls the body’s functions such as the heart, breathing. The reptilian brain is reliable but is also inflexible. 
• Secondly the Limbic brain which emerged firstly in mammals. It is responsible for emotions. It is what we use to make moral judgements.
• The Neocortex became important in primates. It has been responsible for the development of abstract thought, language and essentially cognition. 

I’m interested in this idea of the brain because although our cognitive functions have developed significantly in recent years, we still fight every day to overcome our emotions and our irrationality. I don’t understand how individuals come to different conclusions which is due to more than just the information we absorb. It is to how we process this information.

A conversation with a friend pushed me to question how our brain works and works particularly in relation to how we perceive risk to ourselves and the wider population and if we think we are being rational about our weighing up process? It seems something we pay little attention to but everyday we are assessing actions through the lens of risk. Some of it obviously when we decide at what point to cross a road with on coming traffic and at other times almost dismissively – the choice over where to go out that night for example. In such decisions we sub-consciously think about the probability of something occurring versus the return to it or the cost of doing it. You would presume that over time we as a species would have become more accurate in assessing the risks surrounding our actions.

 
But there is a lot of research showing that actually we are not very good at judging probabilities. We overestimate the chances of a rare event occurring and underestimate the chances of more common events occurring. We also like to make fast, automatic, unconscious decisions (Daniel Kahneman calls this System 1 thinking). He suggests this automatic thinking can be ok if based on specific experience relevant to our decision making. But if not it may increase our confidence in how we decide something, but not the accuracy of that decision. This could be because of noise in the information we are considering or because our expertise is not truly based on a casual relationship (i.e this happens because of X) – we may be mis-judging what we understand. 

How we consider probability is also a function of how we read statistics or gather our information and many other behavioural biases which I won’t go into now. But vivid stories also tend to swamp our thoughts around probability as coherent narratives tend to help us make sense of the world and can connect to us emotionally. 

Robert Greene has written a book called The Laws of Human Nature. I have skim read some of it. He discusses how emotion is such a powerful drive within us. ‘We humans live on the surface, reacting emotionally to what people say or do. We form opinions of others and ourselves that are rather simplified. We settle for the easiest and most convenient story to tell ourselves’. He mentions that although we think that we are in control of our behaviour and actions that actually we do not really understand what drives us – a collection of forces pushing us in different directions. He calls this set of forces human nature and believes our nature has developed and changed over millions of years as we have evolved.

 
Our nature can lead us to be irrational in how we judge things – we are hard wired for emotion to take precedence in many circumstances. It takes years of education, awareness and discipline for cognition (the third brain) to overcome emotions (our second brain). Some people have learnt to utilise cognitive functions to become more rational which is partly why I think we each perceive risk differently.

 
I accept that what I have written is a gross over simplification and that there are many other behavioural drivers. But it is interesting to be try to be aware of when anecdotes or a story that resonates drives our decision making over facts.