How our minds evolved to understand other people, and why we overestimate this ability

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

About how a person "domesticated" himself.

Individuum recently published The Inner Storyteller. How Brain Science Can Help You Compose Thrilling Stories by Will Storr - about how the human mind creates stories and how film studios and writers manipulate our subconscious. With permission from Lifehacker Publishing, he publishes an excerpt from the book on the development of the brain and our social skills.

Like all animals, our species is only able to perceive a narrow slice of reality directly related to our survival. Dogs live mainly in the world of smells, moles - in tactile sensations, and black knife fish lives in the realm of electrical impulses.

The human world, in turn, is mostly filled with other people. Our highly social brain is specifically designed to better control our fellows.

People are gifted with a unique ability to understand each other.

To control our environment, we must be able to predict the behavior of other people, the gravity and complexity of which dooms us to the possession of insatiable curiosity.

For hundreds of millennia, we have been social animals and our survival depended directly on interaction with other people. But it is believed that over the past thousand generations, social instincts have been rapidly honed and strengthened by The Domesticated Brain, Bruce Hood (Pelican, 2014). … The "dramatic increase" in the importance of social traits to natural selection, according to developmental psychologist Bruce Hood, has given us a brain "delightfully designed to interact with each other."

In the past, for people living in a hostile environment, aggressiveness and physical qualities were critically important. But the more we began to interact with each other, the more useless these traits became. When we moved to settled life, such qualities began to deliver even more problems. People who know how to find a common language with each other began to achieve greater success than physically dominant aggressors.

Success in society meant greater reproductive success The number of copies of genes passed on to the next generation, which is also capable of reproduction., and so gradually a new kind of man was formed. The bones of these new people became thinner and weaker than those of their ancestors, muscle mass decreased, and physical strength was almost halved. '' The Domestication of Human ', Robert G. Bednarik, 2008, Anthropologie XLVI / 1, p. 1-17.a. The special chemical structure of the brain and the hormonal system predisposed them to behavior designed for sedentary cohabitation.

The level of interpersonal aggression has decreased, but the psychological ability to manipulate has increased, which is necessary for negotiations, trade and diplomacy. They have become specialists in social environment management.

The situation can be compared to the difference between a wolf and a dog. The wolf survives by interacting with other wolves, fighting for dominance in its group and hunting prey. The dog manipulates its owners in such a way that they are ready to do anything for it. The power that my beloved Labradoodle Parker has over me is frankly embarrassing. (I even dedicated this damn book to her.)

In essence, this is not just an analogy. Some researchers, including Hood, argue that modern humans have gone through a process of "self-domestication." Part of the argument in favor of this theory is the fact that our brains have shrunk by 10-15% over the past 20,000 years. Exactly the same dynamics was observed in all 30 (or so) animal species domesticated by humans. As with these animals, our domestication means that we are more submissive than our ancestors, better at reading social signals, and more dependent on others. However, Hood writes, "none of the animals has been domesticated to the same extent as ourselves."

Our brains may have originally evolved to "cope with a threatened world of predators, food shortages and inclement weather, but now we rely on it to navigate an equally unpredictable social landscape."

These are unpredictable people. That's what stories are made of.

For modern man, to control the world means to control other people, and this requires understanding them. We are designed to be captivated by others and gain valuable information by reading their faces.

This passion arises almost immediately after birth. Unlike monkeys, who hardly look at the faces of their cubs, we cannot tear ourselves away from the faces of our babies Evolutionary Psychology, Robin Dunbar, Louise Barrett, & John Lycett (Oneworld, 2007) p. 62.. In turn, people's faces are attracted to On the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd (Harvard University Press, 2010) p. 96. newborns are like nothing else, and within an hour after birth, babies begin to imitate them. By the age of two, they already know how to use the social smile technique The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood (Constable and Robinson, 2011) p. 29.. As they grow up, they master the art of reading others so masterly that they automatically calculate 'Effortless Thinking', Kate Douglas, New Scientist, December 13, 2017. character and status of a person, without spending more than one tenth of a second on it.

The evolution of our extraordinary, highly obsessed brain has led to bizarre side effects. The obsession of people with faces is so frantic that we see them almost everywhere: in the flames of a campfire, in the clouds, in the depths of ominous corridors, and even on toasted bread in a toaster.

In addition, we sense other minds everywhere. Just as our brain creates a model of the world around us, it also creates models of the mind.

This skill - a necessary weapon in our social arsenal - is known as the "model of the human state of mind" or "theory of mind." He gives us the opportunity to imagine what others are thinking, feeling and plotting, even if they are not around. Thanks to him, we can look at the world from the point of view of another person. According to psychologist Nicholas Epley, this ability, obviously key to storytelling, has given us incredible opportunities. “Our species conquered the Earth through its ability to comprehend the minds of others,” writes Mindwise, Nicholas Epley (Penguin, 2014) p. xvii. he, - not because of the protruding thumb or dexterous handling of tools."

We develop this skill at about four years old. It is from this moment that we are ready for stories; become equipped enough to understand the logic of the story.

Human religions were born of the ability to bring imaginary versions of other people's minds into our minds. Shamans in the hunter-gatherer tribes fell into a trance state and interacted with the spirits in an attempt to gain control of the world. Ancient religions tended to be animistic: our storytelling brain projected a human-like mind onto trees, rocks, mountains, and animals, imagining that the gods were sitting in them, in charge of the course of events, and they needed to be controlled through rituals and sacrifices.

In truth, we never grow out of our inherent animism.

Who among us has not struck the door in revenge, pinching our fingers, believing in this moment of blinding pain that the door did it on purpose? Who hasn't sent the hell out of an "easy-to-assemble" cabinet?

Whose brain-storyteller itself did not fall into a kind of artistic trap, touchingly allowing the sun to inspire optimism about the upcoming day, and, on the contrary, thickening clouds to catch up with melancholy? Statistics claim that people who endow their car with personality elements are less likely to sell it Mindwise, Nicholas Epley (Penguin, 2014) p. 65…. Bankers endow the market with human qualities and transact with this Mindwise, Nicholas Epley (Penguin. 2014) p. 62..

Nevertheless, no matter how successful people are in the art of understanding other people's minds, we still tend to significantly overestimate our abilities. While attempts to force human behavior into strict limits of absolute numerical values are absurd, some researchers argue that strangers can read your thoughts and feelings with an accuracy of 20% Mindwise, Nicholas Epley (Penguin, 2014) p. nine.. Friends and family? Only 35%.

Our misconceptions about other people's thoughts are the cause of many troubles. As we move along our path in life, mistakenly predicting what other people think and how they will react to our attempts to control them, we unhappily provoke feuds, clashes and disagreements that ignite destructive fires of unexpected changes in our social spaces.

Many comedies, be their author William Shakespeare, John Cleese British actor, comedian and director, co-founder of the Monty Python troupe. - Approx. per. or Connie Booth American actress and screenwriter who has worked on English television, including with Monty Python. In 1995 she left show business to become a psychotherapist. - Approx. per. are built around errors like this. But regardless of the way they are told, well-thought-out characters always make assumptions about the thoughts of other characters, and since it is still a dramatic work, their assumptions often turn out to be wrong. All this leads to unexpected consequences, and with them to an increase in the dramatic effect.

Writer Richard Yates uses a similar error to create a dramatic turning point in his classic novel, Road to Change. The piece depicts Frank and April Wheeler's falling apart marriage. When they were young and in love, they dreamed of a bohemian life in Paris. But by the time we met with them, the midlife crisis had already overtaken them. Frank and April have two children and will soon have a third; they moved to a typical house in the suburbs. Frank works for his father's old company and is gradually getting used to a life of booze-flavored lunches and the convenience of being a housewife. But April doesn't share his happiness. She still dreams of Paris. They swear violently. Do not sleep together anymore.

Frank is cheating on his wife with a girlfriend from work. And here he makes a mistake from the point of view of the theory of reason. In an attempt to break the impasse, Frank decides to confess his infidelity to his wife. The model of consciousness he built for April implies that recognition will lead her into a state of catharsis, after which she will stop hovering in the clouds. Yes, of course, it will not do without tears, but they will only remind him to the old woman why she still loves him.

This is not happening. After listening to her husband's confession, April asks why?

Not why he cheated, but why bother telling her about it? She doesn't care about his affairs. This is not at all what Frank expected. He wants her to be worried about this!

“I know what you want,” April tells him. - I think I would care if I loved you; but the point is that it is not. I don’t love you, I never did, and until this week I never really understood it.”

Will Storr is a British writer and journalist and author of the bestselling Selfie. Why we are fixated on ourselves and how it affects us. His new book, The Inner Storyteller, on neuropsychology and the art of storytelling, is well worth reading not only for writers and screenwriters, but for anyone who loves cinema, fiction and how our brains work.