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Cro-Magnon Mind

That (SOB) Same Old Brain . . . Different World


Sometimes, the more things stay the same, the more things stay the same. A frustrated and angry young doctor with $250,000 in tuition debt cried, "I wasn't considering my long-term happiness when I was 18 years old, nor did anyone bring it to my attention." Just out of med school at a top Ivy League university, this orthopedic surgeon is looking for a new career path, one that fits. Things haven't changed since I graduated high school a quarter-century ago. So, why aren't we yet providing high school juniors and seniors with better career choice mentoring? To answer this question well, let's explore human nature in the face of change and the history of our mind.

One Aspect of Human Nature


Usually, changes that we may be ready for don't happen until we have enough proof that the change is necessary and doable. When it comes to considering a major change in our lives, or in society at large, we all know how easy it is to fall back on the same old way of doing things. We humans love our routines. In the morning we brush our teeth, drink our coffee, grab the newspaper, and sit in traffic jams to go to jobs we don't particularly care for. Human life needs rhythms, which are important for reducing the stress of living in an unpredictable world. If we had to change things up everyday, and completely reinvent what we do and where we go, life would feel chaotic. Even if we don't like our routine, we'll usually opt not to upset it. Unknowns can create enough anxiety and fear to keep us locked into the usual way of doing things. This default behavior gets short-circuited if "keeping things the same" becomes an actual threat itself. For example, when the Washington DC sniper was on the loose, the whole metropolitan area experienced higher levels of stress. People were hesitant to do regular daily activities like shopping and going to work or school. Hundreds, if not thousands of the schools within a 90-mile radius went into lock down mode; no one was allowed outside for lunch. Even Friday night football games were cancelled. The threat to any one of us in the DC area was very small, but most of us reacted as if our chance of being the next victim was likely. Daily life changed. The take out and home delivery food businesses boomed, and retail stores weren't getting many customers. An anomaly in our environment caused us to react. We adapted to the situation, changing our "same old" way of life. For a short period of time, keeping things the same was no longer comfortable.

The History of Our Mind


It's difficult to fully grasp the "keep-things-the-same" side of our nature until we look at the history of becoming human. Why do we do this? A key feature of the human brain is to notice sudden changes in our environment, as they occur. We pay little attention to things we see regularly. Mother Nature "designed" our brains for a world long ago, where survival was a daily activity. Spotting sudden changes gave us a survival edge. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ehrlich concludes in his book "Human Natures," that we are "sight" animals, superb at handling crisis situations that we can "see," like an attack from a tiger in the bushes. As long as we can literally see the threat, we are quite tactful at solving the problem. Throughout most of our evolution, with about 250,000 generations of daily practice, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Our daily lives were full of safari-like dangers. Since our brains were evolving during this period, it makes sense that they were genetically "fitted" with hardware to deal extremely well with sudden anomalies in our environment. We would get overloaded if we were conscious of all incoming information; hence our brains were designed to go on automatic pilot most of the time, allowing us to focus our conscious awareness on the most critical changes in our surroundings. On the flip side, we have developed very little innate sensitivity to changes that happen slowly, over long periods of time. Out of sight, out of mind. What we could not see didn't matter, especially in the small world our brain was adapted for long ago. In sum, the human brain (and our five sensory input system) is designed to pay attention to any change that stands out against a backdrop of constancy. For example, notice how your sense of smell will tire with continuous exposure to odors in your home, where a visitor will pick up the scent instantly.

The DC sniper, a modern world version of a sabre tooth tiger, prompted our survival-brain-gear into action. Early in the sniper investigation, bystanders noticed a white van speeding away from the scene. Law enforcement had to go on any lead, so the white van was identified as an anomaly, the new "change in our environment." One afternoon during the sniper's siege, I counted 10 white vans within a 1-mile strip of highway, in less than three minutes. White delivery vans are everywhere, speeding along, all day long. They have become part of our backdrop of constancy. Just like your sense of smell tires easily, we didn't notice white vans as one of the most common vehicles on the road. Without being aware of their frequency, bystanders say they spotted a white van at just about every crime scene. Operating as humans always have--sighting anomalies-- so we thought. In the meantime, the sniper was passing through police roadblocks, including eleven license plate checks, in a burgundy Caprice.

The Problem with the Solution


Mother Nature's solution, in promoting our survivability in a dangerous environment, was to give us the gift of crisis problem solving. This wonderful ability to quickly respond to life's sudden uncertainties served us well in our ancestral environment, and no doubt played a key role in moving us from living hand-to-mouth as hunters and gatherers for 6.5 million years, to living in complex modern societies. The advent of the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago accelerated our accumulation of cultural and technological know-how, but our brain biology stayed the same. Environmental pressures changed for the better, but we still largely lived off the land in harsh survival conditions, literally all the way up until the mid 1800s. In geological time, it was just a few days ago that we were still living like our distant relative, Cro-Magnon man. This means that up until that last century or so (for millions of years), we largely only needed to rely on our five-sensory-perception brain to understand and survive in our small tribal world. Our brain has not had near enough time to adapt to living in large tribes, e.g., modern cities and nations, and brain scientists don't believe our mental wiring will change anytime soon. As Robert Ornstein (Stanford brain psychologist) would say, we're stuck with the same old brain (SOB!). The industrial revolution, spawned practically yesterday (300 years ago), catapulted us into an environment very foreign to the one our brain was biologically "wired" for. Although we have the ability to build great cities and societies to cushion us from many of the hazards of living on planet earth, we are still learning how to manage large social and physical systems that rely on observations beyond our immediate sensory input. Unfortunately, we can't rest on our gray matter. We need a new mind set for this new world.

As soon as we started living in more complex environments, e.g., cities, states, nations, and the now the global economy, our problems got much more complex. Many of the looming problems challenging us in the 21st century are not visible to the naked eye. Global warming, for example, is a problem that is still not taken very seriously. Is it a real problem? Without scientific measurements over longer periods of time, would any of us have enough evidence to know that it may be sneaking up on us? If we continue to weigh our problems as we always have, like that frog in a pot, the water will start to boil before we can leap out. Remember, our brains are designed to respond visible threats, vague evidence is usually not enough to convince us to act. Evolutionary biologists believe that our innate talent (survival mind) to deal with immediate danger, as sight animals, is inadequate to competently solve our modern world dilemmas using only our current "wait and see" approach. We are no longer living in small tribal communities where we can keep an eye on the immediate dangers lurking in the bushes. By the time we would have enough sensate data to "see" the problem, it usually is already causing havoc.

Cro-Magnon Teen


Back to our opening question, why aren't we guiding teens to make more sophisticated choices in setting their life course? The career world "environment" has changed, but our mainstream career choice process is a hangover from a time when choices were few. When comes to choosing our career path, "keeping things the same" is an understatement. To illustrate, let's imagine a 17-year-old Cro-Magnon teen hitching a ride on a time machine 40,000 years ago and landing in one of our high schools in the year 2002. He would have no clue about how modern society works, rather, his main concern would be to find a mate, reproduce, raise a family, hunt (get a job), and stay alive. Ironically, he would easily blend in with today's teens. Approaching his senior year, he wouldn't be thinking about his long-term fulfillment. First on his mind is gaining social status in his tribe, the more status, the more wealth, comfort, security, and of course, access to the best mating partners. Sound familiar? Given the few careers choices he would have had in prehistory--hunter, toolmaker, craftsman, killer of enemies--you'd think he would be quite picky with all the thousands of choices available in the modern world. Well, maybe that's wishful thinking. Practically speaking, we realize that he would look to his teenage peers, and parents, to see how "modern-age" people are choosing their careers. As it turns out, he wouldn't learn much of anything new about how to make life choices. Our status and survival "minds" are setting the course for our lives without us knowing it (see "The Bachelor" TV program for a modern glimpse). At the moment, it appears that Mother Nature did not architect a "long-term fulfillment" circuit into our brain. Our SOB (status seeking and survival minds) don't care about our long-term happiness, we have to convince these parts of ourselves that there is a lot more to life than finding a sexy mate.

So, what do our teens have to say about all this? I recently asked a group of 35 juniors and seniors at a local public high school if they were planning to go to college. Most are, but only two felt relatively certain about their field of study. Needless to say, most were taking a confident stab in the dark; and listed "comfort and prestige" as the main appeal for their career considerations. Their Cro-Magnon mind is doing the choosing. None of the teens had even heard of such a thing as having "natural talent," and thought it idealistic to pursue something enjoyable for a living. Surprisingly, most had a healthy skepticism about following a path solely for status reasons, but not enough mentoring or personal conviction to know how to pursue a path that would bring long-term satisfaction. Simply put, they were "not choosing," as can be expected without good tools; Cro-Magnon mind doing most of the thinking. Our career and daily lifestyle environment has completely changed, but our brain hasn't learned to make sense of this new world yet. Remember, our same old brain doesn't easily see changes that happen over long periods of time. The complexity of living and working in our world has slowly and steadily crept up on us over the last 150 years. Like the white delivery vans, we haven't been paying attention to critical changes in our way of life. We live much longer and healthier, well past our Cro-Magnon ancestors who died before age forty. In prehistory it made sense to let our status and survival minds make most of our choices. Without social status and survival savvy, our chances of reproduction were limited. Today, we can own our first home, BMW, and raise a family before age thirty, and many of us will likely have 50 more years to enjoy. Was your career direction designed to keep you happy beyond age 30? Career choices that satisfy our early adulthood desires usually do not serve our long-term need to do something personally meaningful, our brains were not designed to worry about the far off future. If you stumbled into your career as if it were largely a means to comfort and status, you can bet that S.O.B. was at the bottom of it!

So, how do we human beings go about convincing our SOB to think about long-term happiness? Stay tuned . . .

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Quotes to Inspire
Quite cleary nature did not tell the honeybee to go out and crosspollinate the vegetation. What nature did was to genetically program the honeybee to go after the honey and inadvertently crosspollinate . . . What nature told humanity (genetically) was, I'm hungry, my kids are hungry; I'm cold, my kids are cold. Go after that food and coat. They cost money--go after the money. They say you have to earn it. OK, I'll earn it. Buzz, buzz, honey-money bee. No human genes are programmed to say- - go make the world work for everybody- - only your creative mind can tell you that.

~Bucky Fuller
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©2003 Pathfinders. All rights reserved. Articles copyright Pathfinders and Anthony Spadafore.