Chapter 2: Our Grand Inheritance

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Nietzsche believed that you and I do not possess a singular, constant self but, rather, a multiplicity of instinctual drives.  The sex drive is the most obvious one.  But we have all sorts of drives...for success, knowledge, freedom, recognition, power, closure, validation, etc.  If you can think of life as a “quest” for something, that something is most likely one of Nietzsche's drives.  

Neuroscience and Buddhism agree with Nietzsche about our shifting sense of self.  Our brains have evolved to accommodate a plurality of possible selves, depending on which instinctual drive or combination of instinctual drives most influences our lives at any given moment.  Human brains are hardwired to express drives, likely because drives have a high survival value.  The survival instinct itself is a drive.  Having conquered survival, for the most part, contemporary life still relies upon a multitude of drives (quests, efforts, ambitions) that created it.

When a baby is born it comes into the world with an Operating System (OS).  Part of that OS is essentially geared toward the multiplicity of drives but another part engages various cognitive biases of belief, social interaction, and memory.  There are hundreds of possible cognitive biases.  Everyone is born with them.  Though each baby's brain is theoretically capable of all biases, each baby will exhibit only a few of them (thankfully) during its lifetime.  Each baby brain comes with numerous biases, ready to go before they can even breathe.

Examples of biases include confirmation bias (seeking out only information that supports what you already believe and ignoring other possibilities), the Dunning-Kruger Effect (over-inflating your understanding of one thing while trivializing the importance of another thing simply because you don't know much about it), in-group bias (any knowledge outside your social group is suspect and probably wrong), optimism/pessimism bias (things will turn out for the better or for the worst depending upon your preconceptions), and the false consensus effect (it is OK for me to do something because “everyone else is doing it”).

The combination of cognitive biases, along with the multiplicity of instinctual drives, within each baby is distinctive due to natural variation, like fingerprints, and different social environments.  If we exhibit behavior with more than a few biases attempting to manifest simultaneously (competing like drives compete within the multiplicity) then we are likely to experience life as an unorchestrated struggle and will probably present some sort of neurosis.

Cognitive biases can be combined into behavioral prejudices.  Racism, sexism, and xenophobia are rampant throughout the human race.  But cognitive biases are not necessarily “good” or “bad.”  They facilitate mental shortcuts allowing the brain to process experience more efficiently.  Since biases place much of our behavior more or less on automatic, it frees our brain to focus on other tasks.  

One cognitive bias particularly enhances our survival chances, yet almost no one notices it.  Our OS possesses the inherent ability to detect patterns, to discern sequence.  Our brains are hardwired to see patterns in the world around us and in ourselves.  This highly advantageous.  If our brain detects an incomplete pattern or cannot find a clear pattern then our fantastic imagination will create one because the bias needs to work itself out. 

This is the narrative bias.  It obviously helps us make sense of events, putting observations into a sequence (A+B=C), learn to anticipate what will happen next (a big plus when hunting, you can predict where the animal will be before you throw the spear) and it allows us to store more knowledge because it enables story-telling as a technique for memory and meaning.

Of course, a lot of the time our predictions are wrong because our understanding of the pattern is inadequate, if not completely fictional.  But the imperfect sense-making benefit of narrative bias outweighs the comparative ignorance of not seeing any pattern to anything at all.  This bias is deeply seated in human consciousness and, therefore, precious to most people.  
 

Over tens of thousands of years, the neurons in our brains have developed a preference (a neurohabit) to fire in particular patterns that create narrative, actually many simultaneous narratives.  Indeed, without narrative (whether factual or imaginary) we could not understand the world at all.  By nature, we are story-tellers.

How do you remember a list of items without the ability to write them down?  Modern humanity has almost entirely lost this skill because we rely on texts to assist our memory without giving it a second thought.  But for most of human existence we have not been able to write.  Once upon a time, everything that was known in the world was known orally.  

The average life expectancy 70,000 years ago was about 30 years.  You were far more likely to die of malnutrition, disease, natural disaster, tribal combat, infant mortality, or attacks by predators that ate humans than you were to live to the ripe old age of, say, 50.  Those who managed to survive that long, however, would have known most of everything that could be known.

As with the Vedas, which came much later, knowledge was completely at the mercy of what people could tell and remind each other, clearly satisfying our narrative bias.  Simply memorizing all of a tribe's knowledge was beyond the capacity of anyone.  It was (and remains so even today) far easier to remember facts about life not as an oral list or spoken code but as a narrative – as a story or poem or song or chant that everyone would learn through simple repetition.  Our brains are hardwired to relate to knowledge as a narrative story.

According to science writer Gaia Vince (2020): “Information told through stories is far more memorable...because multiple parts of the brain are activated for narratives...Our brains react as though we were living the story and experiencing it firsthand.” (page 85)

“...our brains have evolved to understand the world through narrative, making stories phenomenally powerful cultural tools – another mutually, reinforcing gene-culture coevolution.  We weave narrative around all of life's events, we make sense of the world and our own lives through stories, and many of us give authorship of this ongoing saga to supernatural creators.” (page 86)

“Stories are the cognitive tools we have evolved in order to understand and interact with the world.  We dream in stories and our inner voice provides the narrative to our waking hours, making sense of the world through stories...” (page 88)

So our pattern-seeking narrative cognitive bias was a natural precursor to hardwiring the human brain to accommodate knowledge and memory through story or song.  70,000 years ago (or so), for reasons unknown, the human brain suddenly became capable of operating at a more complex level.  Rudimentary symbolism and ritual likely took hold of people.  Archaeologically, we begin to find the first jewelry and funeral rites at this time, for example.  

It seems reasonable that the mental revolution was based on our expanded ability to experience meaning through incorporating multiple stories and songs into our lives via language and human culture.  The ability to access and express meta-narratives is a likely cornerstone for the Cognitive Revolution.  The revolution meant that, collectively, we could simply remember more stuff.  It was a revolution in stories and songs.

It would work something like this.  Every night around the camp fire, our ancestors would recite, chant or sing stories that contained specific forms of knowledge.  These story/songs would be known by everyone who was old enough to speak or sing them.  Little children would sing without understanding the words or sounds.  But, if they survived, the meanings came to be known through talking to their elders, who understood the song.  

Symbolic meaning only amplified the knowledge contained in a story because it automatically represented another set of “facts” outside the “facts” as told in the story.  Dance and other rituals might give the knowledge a sacred or deeply resonating quality.

If the clan was lucky enough to survive and grow larger, then specialized knowledge could be learned and, more importantly, remembered.  Again, it would take the form of stories told in poems and songs specific to, say, hunting or medicine or astrology or why the clan's day was structured the way it was or why the weather often behaved as it did or any other knowledge applications.  

The more specialists of song and story a clan possessed, the richer the overall knowledge of the clan.  This happened to the ancient Far Eastern and Middle Eastern tribes that formed the first civilizations along or near the Nile and Yangtze rivers.

But if the clan was suddenly attacked by a rival people or if disease wiped out almost everyone then the knowledge of any specialist who died would be lost.  All that would be remembered was contained in the songs and stories everyone who survived remembered.  Some of the knowledge might live on in the form of imitation or habit or perhaps from interbreeding with other clans, but, essentially, knowledge passed in and out of collective humanity at the whims of circumstance.  

This haphazard way of amassing knowledge remained for tens of thousands of years.  It is ironic that almost as much was forgotten as was remembered during the 70,000-year span of the Cognitive Revolution.

Fortunate clans grew large enough or perhaps formed alliances with nearby clans so that specialized knowledge would gain a greater foothold and survive from one short-lived generation to the next.  Here's the point.  After enough time, all of these stories and songs impacted the wiring of the brain.  Our brain, already geared toward narrative bias, slowly rewired itself to interpret existence within the very narratives that everyone could recite.

This was the unreliable nature of knowledge until the invention of writing literally freed everyone from trying to remember everything.  No wonder cognitive evolution took so long.  In a very concrete sense, for a vast expanse of centuries, human knowledge was physically limited by how many of us there were to remember things.  There was a definable upward limit to what could be put into story or song.

Fast forward to roughly the year 1600, the beginning of the Western Enlightenment.  Over the course of recent centuries, new narratives emerged, holding secular and scientific “facts” to be the basis of all knowledge.  Secularism still allowed for symbolism and knowledge to be placed in stories and songs, but it was a strange knowledge, a purely human (not divine) inspiration.  According to science, however, reality was not contained within stories and songs at all.  

Science offered a comprehensive, fragmented catalog of facts that relate to one another in complex ways that stories could not accurately convey.  Sometimes the facts did not relate at all.  Symbols became signs.  There are no songs in science.  It does not take much effort to understand how profoundly strange this was (and still is) to the mass of humanity nurtured in the old ways of knowledge and story.  

For 70,000 years our brains developed a neurology based upon stories of tribal and cultural intent. Then, abruptly, science and secular society came along attempting to replace story and song with strange narratives and clinical lists of facts.  This was never going to go over well.  The past has increasingly collided with the future in recent centuries.  Our neuroplasticity is being tested. That is clearly what is desperately needed. Now, as change accelerates like never before, the intensity of this collision is the root cause of our polarized, dysfunctional society.  

Story and fact are obviously not the same thing.  For most of humanity, our narrative bias, our need for stories is far more “truthful” than any scientific fact.  This is not due to a lack of intelligence or a political leaning.  It is because every human brain needs rewiring to embrace the future.  Yet, rewiring is often disciplined work and most people are not willing to put forth that effort.  It is the world that needs rewiring, not themselves.  This is probably the single greatest problem facing humanity because without flexible minds, the world will continue to become ever more strange and human behavior within it ever more unstable.