All organisms "think" in the sense that they respond to their environment.
One-celled organisms think by running their cell chemistry differently in different conditions. Animals, such as humans, think by both changing chemistry, and by using their brains.
There many, many kinds of thinking, but I'm going to break human brain thinking into two broad categories: instinctive thinking and adaptive thinking. Let me talk about adaptive thinking first.
Adaptive thinking happens when the brain encounters a situation that is strange. A classic case is a child learning to ride a bicycle. A child doesn't know how to ride a bicycle. There were no bicycles in Neolithic Village era or even Agriculture era. The first chain-driven bicycle was invented in 1885.
So... to ride a bicycle, a child has to learn. He or she practices, and the brain figures out what has to happen to do this action successfully. This is adaptive learning.
Likewise, learning to read, write and do mathematics are all cases of adaptive learning. Much of what we do in the civilized lifestyle takes adaptive learning to master.
The converse is instinctive learning. Instinctive learning is an activity the body is hard-wired to do. Extreme examples of instinctive learning are vision and hearing. These are things that Mother Nature, Design Engineer, has been experimenting with for billions of generations, and the results are now so good that modern computers still can't match the performance levels of animal vision.
All human learning is on a continuum between vision and bicycle riding. Those problems that humans deal with regularly for a long time, are handled more and more by hard wired instinctive thinking. Those problems that are new, or come up only once in a while, are handled by adaptive thinking.
Both are very useful, but adaptive thinking is more like an insurance policy: for day-to-day use it's slow and it's expensive. When you need it, you're sure glad you have it -- but most of the time, you'd rather be using instinct. Instinctive thinking is fast, comfortable and easy to do.
Since humans have been living in the Neolithic Village environment for thousands of generations, the human brain has been steadily adding hard-wiring that is well suited for that environment.
About five hundred generations ago, the brain started adding hard-wiring for the Agricultural environment.
It was only ten generations ago that the Industrial environment first appeared, and we have not a single grown-to-maturity Information Age generation yet.
Note that this new thinking is added on top of the old Neolithic Village thinking. The old thinking is not lost, it's just not used as much. But it's there and it's ready to be used, and it would love to be used.
So much for review, now, what are some examples of old-style instinctive thinking showing up in modern situations?
Neolithic Village Insider/Outsider thinking shows up in a lot of places and a lot ways. Being part of a small group is a very easy thinking pattern to adopt. Here are some famous examples.
In 2008, Bernard Madoff, a well-respected Wall Street insider, revealed that he had been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade -- at times he was not making enough money from his investments to meet his promises to investors, so he had been using new money to pay off older obligations when they were called. When the crisis finally hit, his investors were out around $50 billion.
Fifty Billion Dollars! You can fight a war in Iraq for more than a year with that kind of money!
How did this come to pass?
Bernard Madoff was a master at taking advantage of old Neolithic Village "insider/outsider" thinking. He made people feel comfortable that he was an insider, and, by letting him invest their money, they would become insiders, too.
This kind of crime falls into the general category of a confidence crime. It is perpetrated by a "confidence man" who gains trust, then betrays it.
This crime, and many, many activities that are not crimes, play off the old Neolithic Village instinct to trust insiders and be suspicious of outsiders.
In Neolithic Village times, late teenagehood was the time for most fertile women to start having babies. This modern incarnation is a classic case of instinctive thinking sneaking into modern times.
Cults and other small groups where the members isolate themselves from the normal flow of the community around them are stimulating this same Neolithic Village insider/outsider instinct. This thinking can become very, very comfortable in some people. So comfortable, that when people are forced out of the group, they get very unhappy. And, it’s part of the lifestyle that some people are forced out of such a group. Exile of dissenters and troublemakers is very much a part of the Neolithic Village living process.
If such cults exist for long, they develop a circle of ex-cult cult haters around them.
Fashion is about women looking beautiful. It works because helping young, healthy, potentially reproductive woman helps the community. Note that this desire to help young women springs up in both men and women, and for this reason fashion is as much about appealing to women as it is to men.
While the details of what is fashionable change, there is one theme that remains constant: a woman who is fashionable looks like she is making a big sacrifice. In contemporary times, keeping weight low, wearing cosmetics, walking in high heels and getting tattoos and piercing are all examples of sacrifice.
Examples from older times:
o Women of Han China binding their feet. (perhaps not coincidentally, it is a process that produces visual results much like those of walking in high heels)
o Women of Renaissance Italy putting the poison belladonna in their eyes to dilate the pupils.
o Women of French Revolution-era France while attending a ball would sometimes fall into a garden pool and get completely drenched. Rather than change their clothes they would continue to party, and the damp clothing would highlight their slim figures. Did many get cold and then sick? Yes! But they did it anyway.
These are examples of sacrificing for beauty. They are done because they signal that the young woman wants to be cooperated with, and this signal is well recognized and consistently responded to by the rest of the community.
Older women pursue fashion because they want the same benefits as younger women – they want the cooperation, too.
(Note: this section is currently a fun speculation, nothing more.)
The sacrificing for beauty is a constant of young woman thinking, and responding to it is a deep instinct of the whole human community.
But the details of the sacrifice keep changing! Why is that?
Here's my theory: I suspect this is a defense mechanism to protect younger women from older women.
Older women were younger women just a few years earlier. They remember well the cooperation they got, but they tend to forget the bride thinking they had to do to get it. What the older women see instead is the power of the visual signals -- the power of beauty.
So, they work hard to look like young women, too -- they work hard to look beautiful. To the extent that they succeed, they are "gaming the system" -- the system is designed to give extra support to younger women who are having their first children, not older woman who can now fend for themselves.
So, to fend off the older imitators, each cohort of young women comes up with a different way to look fashionable. The stakes are high -- lots of community cooperation -- so there is a lot of tension in this relation, and that's why the fashion business tends to be so uncertain and exciting.
So, fashion is a billions of dollars industry built on Neolithic Village thinking. This is an example of an instinct coming through in modern times.
It is a common and chronic complaint that campaigning politicians don't talk about issues. Why is this?
It's because issues are based on adaptive thinking, and adaptive thinking isn't comfortable thinking. What's comfortable thinking is instinctive thinking.
When you survey a person about how they "feel" about something, you're asking for instinctive thinking to answer. If you ask a person to analyze the situation, then you are asking for adaptive thinking to answer.
Most people vote on their "gut feeling", which means they are letting instinctive thinking make the decision. This is why politicians talk as if they were addressing a Neolithic Village crowd – in such a condition, issues are death, and the bandwagon is everything.