by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
We are the fruits of evolution. Our bodies are a high performance fit for living on earth, and our thinking is just as evolved and high performance.
Thinking is a complex activity, but here I will be dramatically simplifying. This section divides our thinking into two broad categories: Instinctive Thinking and Analytic Thinking. It will describe when and how these pop up in our day-to-day living, and how we use them to make choices and take actions.
This will be a brief description. If you want more details check out my other books on human thinking. (Roger's Business and Insight Series)
Instinctive thinking is the basic kind of thinking for all animals. It is fast, simple, and covers all the basic data interpreting activities animals engage in. It covers things such as reflexes, which allow us to stand, walk and eat. It covers the basic parts of vision -- converting an image that falls on the retina into a form the conscious part of the brain can understand.
In humans it also covers more complex and subtle things. As mentioned earlier, falling in love is a fine example. We don't have to learn how to fall in love, it just starts happening.
(This, by the way, is one easy way to tell if a thought you are having is instinctive in origin. If it just pops up, if it doesn't have to be learned, it is instinctive.)
Instinctive thinking is designed to handle routine activities that we constantly encounter and constantly solve the same ways. It does real well at this. It is fast and comfortable thinking -- so fast, and so comfortable that we rarely give it much conscious thought.
Instincts take thousands of generations to develop, and more thousands when they must be changed because an organism's environment has changed and new instincts are needed. Instincts are the result of evolution encouraging the brain to "hardwire" solutions to routine problems. This means that mankind's instincts are well-adapted to Stone Age living because mankind has been living in Stone Age-style conditions for millions of years -- tens of thousands of generations. (I will often refer to Stone Age living as Neolithic Village living, because even in the 2010's there are people living what we call Stone Age lifestyles.)
That's instinct, now what is Analytic Thinking?
Instinctive thinking handles routine well, but animals sometimes have to deal with other kinds of situations, it-doesn't-happen-often situations. These instinct can't handle well. This takes a totally different kind of thinking, a style I call Analytic Thinking. This is try-and-learn thinking. The more advanced and complex an animal's lifestyle gets, the more important this try-and-learn style thinking becomes because lots more doesn't-happen-often situations come up. Dealing with these well is a powerful virtue of being an advanced organism with advanced thinking skills.
For humans living Industrial Age lifestyles Analytic Thinking covers activities as varied as doing arithmetic and learning to ride a bike.
Analytic thinking, try-and-learn thinking, comes up in some places where we don't even think thinking is happening. An example is the digestive system. When it has to deal with strange foods, it has to learn how to digest them, and it can, with time. This is called acquiring a taste for a food.
For humans the use of Analytic Thinking as been growing dramatically along with language skill and tool use. In fact, I posit, it was the growth of strong language skill -- and the teaching this skill allows -- that let the large and versatile human brain we have developed become a benefit. If we couldn't teach as well as we can, such a big brain would be a waste of resource.
As the community a person lives in becomes more prosperous and technologically advanced, the number of "toys" and "techniques" that are valuable to master grows exponentially. This change puts a lot more emphasis on Analytic Thinking skills. And this is why universal education, and lots of it, is so valuable to industrialized communities.
Instinctive thinking is fast, easy and comfortable. This means that it will be offering action suggestions even when the situation isn't quite right for the routine solution it is suggesting -- it will be sneaking in.
This is a problem, and it gets worse the more a person and a community progress away from the Stone Age environment instinctive thinking is well suited for. Instinct is whispering, or shouting, "Do [X]." even though [X] is not a good solution in the Industrial Age environment the person or community is currently living in.
The solution to this problem is to learn to rely heavily on Analytic Thinking -- to learn (this is very definitely a learned skill) not to act on fast, easy answers until a situation has been well analyzed and the consequences of many possibilities have been thought through. If the fast, easy answer still makes sense after the analyzing is complete, then act on it.
What will happen far more often, though, is learning a new and better way to respond to the situation. This learned solution can get quite fast, too, and will be much more effective at solving the problem. This is what I call the "Sports Thinking" response because when humans learn how to play a sport well, they get very quick at responding to situations, and the response becomes very effective.
What follows are some examples of Instinctive Thinking sneaking in that are common stumbling blocks on the road to living successful Industrial Age lifestyles.
What follows are some of the powerful versions of instinctive thinking that influence history.
In the Neolithic Village environment who to trust is those close to a person on a daily basis -- those living in the same village, friends and family. Everyone else, strangers, can be cooperated with, or betrayed, it makes little emotional difference to other village members or the person dealing with the strangers.
The benefits of betrayal are large immediate gains. An example is robbing someone. The benefits of cooperation are long-term steady gains. An example is getting a large field cleared and farmed year after year.
As a community's lifestyle moves away from Neolithic and towards Industrial, the benefits of cooperation get larger and larger. So far, so good. The kicker is that the world of people who must be cooperated with grows large as well. Its the difference between living off the land in a closed commune and being a road warrior in the globalized economy.
This growing size of the cooperating universe rubs the Us versus Them instinct the wrong way. It is constantly looking for opportunities to betray.
Closely related to Us versus Them thinking is who to blame when things go wrong. The fast and comfortable choice for a leader is to say some stranger is the root of the problem. This is also a comfortable choice for followers. "It's not our problem. Therefore, don't ask us to go through the uncomfort of trying to figure out how fix it."
Humans are inventive. They invent new thinking styles as well as new devices and techniques. One of the big challenges of moving into the Agricultural Age is getting wider cooperation. One way that has worked well is to invoke the "We are the Chosen People" concept. This is an effective way of widening the "Us" feeling to include more people. This lets cooperation in bigger groups feel comfortable.
There are times in life when something deeply scary happens, for the first time, and a quick solution is called for. When this combination comes up, thinking changes a lot. The thinking change is quite noticeable and it is called a panic. The solution a panic thinker comes up with to solve the scary problem is often a terrible one. This is a blunder. The curious part is that it doesn't look like a terrible solution to the person making the choice at the time. Instead, it looks like a real good solution, and the person or community often feels a lot of emotion supporting their choice, even well after the crisis has passed.
Note that this panic thinking style happens most often when the problem is both new as well as scary. If the problem has come up before then sport thinking rather than panic thinking can provide an answer. This is why schools conduct fire drills. The fire drill response is learned, sport thinking. And it works much better.
There is often a conflict of interest between the ambitious members of the community and those promoting fairness. The ambitious members want to work hard and get ahead, as in gain more material prosperity. The fairness members want to make sure that the blessings the community gets are evenly distributed among all members.
One of the odder places this shows up is when standing in line is called for. The fairness-oriented people don't mind it much because everyone must suffer through it, the ambitious-oriented are working hard to find ways to avoid it because it seems like such a time-waster.
Perodically, someone declares the end of the world is coming... and many people listen, and take the declaration somewhat seriously. The listening and taking this seriously side is the mystery.
The Ah-Hah for me was realizing this was a manifestion of the semi-nomadic instinct. Stone Age people were semi-nomads. The village move frequently. When something vital ran out in the local area... time to move on. Because much was going to get left behind there was often a celebration to start the migration. This happened often enough that it became an instinct.
Finding good enough food and pure enough water was constantly on the minds of Stone Age people. This had two evolutionary results: the most obvious is that humans became ominvores -- they could eat both plants and animals. This means that we have robust digestive systems. We can eat all sorts of foods, prepared in all sorts of ways. The second is that, even though Industrial Age people have extrordinarily safe foods by Stone Age standards, we still worry a lot about food.
This leads to constant talk about food, and constant gossip and fads about what are good foods.
Much like food, protecting children is something people constantly worry about. And, just like foods, even though children are extrodinarily safe by Stone Age standards, we still worry a lot about about keeping them safe.
This leads to constant talk, and prescriptive actions, to make them safer.
These are examples of the thinking constants and variables that are part of the fabric of history. When people are searching for an action to take, one of the big choices they face is will they use Instinctive thinking or Analytic thinking to make the choice as to which action to take.
--The End--