Heroes Not Zombies

Just below the long bridge from the mainland to Ile d’Oleron, at low tide, you can see lots of people out gathering seafood, digging up the shells from the mud. I like this photo I took of them one day. I like the blue colour of the scene and the way people are scattered across the beach. I imagine they almost look like notes on a musical stave.

There’s a growing understanding of human beings, human behaviour and character which comes from taking an evolutionary approach. I think that sometimes it’s a bit overdone, but there are significant insights to be gained by taking this perspective.

For example, one way to understand the brain is to use the “triune” model – the idea that you can see three, distinct, regions or parts – the brain stem, the limbic system and the cerebral cortex. Taking an evolutionary perspective we can see that the vital life-sustaining functions of the brain stem are shared with many creatures much further back along the evolutionary tree than human beings. Then we can see the functions of social connection and the emotions which seem to be the domain of the limbic system….functions shared with other mammals. Finally, the cognitive functions of the cerebral cortex, and the development of the frontal regions in particular, are shared with higher primates. This model can help you to get a handle on brain function but it falls down when you take a too reductionist approach to it…..a common problem with a lot of neuroscience which, at worst, degenerates into a kind of phrenology. The brain is a much more complex, massively interconnected, distributed network. It can’t be so easily divided into three separate parts.

Psychologists often explain to people about the alarm function of the amygdala and how it developed to keep us safe as hunters and gatherers but that now that we live in urban environments, pretty free of daily predators, those ancient circuits have a tendency to alert us to imaginary existential threats, rather than real ones.

Last year I read “The Emotional Mind. The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition” by Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel which brilliantly places emotions in a central role in human behaviour by tracing the evolutionary path of affect. It wasn’t an easy read, and I was glad I’d read so much about neuroscience and evolutionary psychology before I came across it, but it really has helped me understand the emotions as “adaptive strategies”…..something I’ve explored in my book, “And not or”

As I was looking through my photo library I found this photo quite close to the one I’ve shared at the beginning of this post –

See any similarities?

Ha! Sometimes I think it helps to remind ourselves that we humans are part of Nature, not apart from Nature. We have a lot in common with all other forms of Life as we mutually strive to survive and thrive.

If remembering our hunter gatherer origins helps us to remember that, then it’s a good thing!