Idiot Brain (14 page)

The most obvious “goal” is self-preservation, so if your goal is to stay alive and something occurs that might interfere with your goal by stopping you being alive, the HPA axis would activate the stress response. This is part of the reason it was believed the HPA axis responded to anything, because humans can and do see threats to the self everywhere.

However, humans are complex, and one result of this is they rely on the opinions and feedback of other humans to a considerable degree. The social self-preservation theory states that humans have a deep-rooted motivation to preserve their social standing (to continue being liked by the people whose approval they value). This gives rise to social-evaluative threat. Specifically, anything that threatens someone's perceived social standing or image interferes with the goal of being liked, and therefore activates the HPA axis, releasing cortisol in the system.

Criticisms, insults, rejections, mockery, these attack and potentially damage our sense of self-worth, especially if done publicly, which interferes with our goal of being liked and accepted. The stress this causes releases cortisol, which has numerous physiological effects (such as increasing release of glucose), but also has direct effects on our brain. We are aware of how the fight-or-flight response heightens our focus and makes our memories more vivid and prominent. Cortisol, along with other hormones released, potentially causes this to happen (to varying degrees) when we're criticized; it makes us experience an actual physical reaction that sensitizes us and emphasizes the memory of the event. This whole chapter is based on the brain's tendency to go overboard when looking for threats, and there's no real reason why this wouldn't include criticism. And when something negative happens and we experience it first hand, producing all the relevant emotions and sensations, the hippocampus and amygdala processes spark into life again, and end up emotionally enhancing the memory and storing it more prominently.

Nice things, such as receiving praise, also produce a neurological reaction via the release of oxytocin, which makes us
experience pleasure, but in a less potent and more fleeting manner. The chemistry of oxytocin means it's removed from the bloodstream in about five minutes; cortisol, by contrast, can linger for over an hour, maybe even two, so its effects are far more persistent.
³⁶
The fleeting nature of pleasure signals may seem a bit of a harsh move by nature, but when things cause us intense pleasure for long periods they tend to be quite incapacitating, as we'll see later.

However, it's easy but misleading to attribute everything that goes on in the brain to the actions of specific chemicals, and this is something that more “mainstream” neuroscience reports do often. Let's look at some other possible explanations for this emphasis of criticism.

Novelty may also play a role. Despite what online comment sections might suggest, most people (with some cultural variations, admittedly) interact with others in a respectful manner due to social norms and etiquette; shouting abuse at someone in the street is not something that respectable people do, unless it's directed at parking enforcement officers, who are apparently exempt from this rule. Consideration and low-level praise are the norm, like saying thank you to the cashier for handing you your change even though it's your money and they've no right to keep it. When something becomes the norm, our novelty-preferring brains start to filter it out more often via the process of habituation.
³⁷
Something happens all the time, so why waste precious mental resources focusing on it when it's safe to ignore?

Mild praise is the standard, so criticism is going to have more impact purely because it's atypical. The single disproving face in a laughing audience is going to stand out more
because
it's so different. Our visual and attention systems
have developed to focus on novelty, difference and “threat,” all of which are technically embodied by the grumpy-looking person. Similarly, if we're used to hearing “well done” and “good job” as meaningless platitudes, then someone saying, “You were crap!” is going to be all the more jarring because it doesn't happen as often. And we will dwell on an unpleasant experience all the more to figure out why it happened, so we can avoid it next time.

Chapter 2
discussed the fact that the workings of the brain tend to make us all somewhat egotistical, with a tendency to interpret events and remember things in such a way as to give us a better self-image. If this is our default state, praise is just telling us what we already “know,” whereas direct criticism is harder to misinterpret and a shock to the system.

If you put yourself “out there” in some form, via a performance, created material or just an opinion you think is worthy of sharing, you are essentially saying, “I think you will like this”; you're visibly seeking people's approval. Unless you're alarmingly confident then there's always an element of doubt and awareness of the possibility that you are wrong. In this instance you are sensitive to the risk of rejection, primed to look for any signs of disapproval or criticism, especially if it's regarding something that you take great pride in or that required a lot of time and effort. When you're primed to look for something you're worried about, you're more likely to find it. Just as a hypochondriac is always able to find himself showing worrying symptoms for rare diseases. This process is called confirmation bias—we seize on what we're looking for and ignore anything that doesn't match up to it.
³⁸

Our brains can really make judgements based only on what we know, and what we know is based on our own conclusions
and experiences, so we tend to judge people's actions based on what we do. So if we're polite and complimentary just because social norms say we should be, then surely everyone else does the same? As a result, every item of praise you receive can be somewhat dubious as to whether it's genuine or not. But if someone criticizes you, not only were you bad, you were
so
bad that someone was willing to go against social norms to point it out. And thus, once again, criticism carries more weight than praise.

The brain's elaborate system for identifying and responding to potential threats may well have enabled humankind to survive the long periods in the wilderness and become the sophisticated, civilized species we are today, but it's not without drawbacks. Our complex intellects allow us not only to identify threats but to anticipate and imagine them too. There are many ways to threaten or frighten a human, which leads to the brain responding neurologically, psychologically or sociologically.

This process can, depressingly, cause vulnerabilities that other humans are able to take advantage of, resulting in actual threats, in a sense. You may be familiar with “negging,” a tactic used by pick-up artists where they approach women and say something that sounds like a compliment but is actually meant to criticize and insult. If a man approached a woman and said the title of this section, that would be negging. Or he might say something like, “I like your hair—most women with your face wouldn't risk a style like that,” or, “I normally don't like girls as short as you, but you seem cool,” or, “That outfit will look great once you lose some weight,” or, “I've no clue how to speak to women because I've only ever seen them through binoculars so I'm going to use cheap psychological
trickery on you in the hope that I will do enough damage to your self-confidence that you are willing to sleep with me.” That last one isn't a typical negging line, admittedly, but in truth it's what they're all saying.

It doesn't need to be this sinister, though. We probably all know the type of person who, when someone has done something to be proud of, will immediately jump in to point out the bits they did wrong. Because why go to the effort of achieving something yourself when you can just bring others down to make yourself feel better?

It's a cruel irony that in looking for threats so diligently, the brain ends up actually creating them.

_____________

*
Social learning can explain much of this. We pick up much of what we know and how to behave from the actions of others, particularly if it's something like responding to a threat, and chimps are similar in that regard. Social phenomena are covered more extensively in
Chapter 7
, but it can't be the whole explanation here, because the weird thing is that when the same procedure was performed with flowers instead of snakes, it was still possible to train chimps to fear them, but the other chimps rarely learned the same fear by observing them. Fear of snakes is easy to pass on; fear of flowers is not. We've evolved an inherent suspicion of potentially lethal dangers, hence fear of snakes and spiders is common.
¹⁴
By contrast, nobody fears flowers (anthophobia), unless they've got a particularly vicious type of hay fever. Less obvious evolved-fear tendencies include fear of elevators, or injections, or the dentist. Elevators cause us to be “trapped,” which can set off alarms in our brains. Injections and the dentist involve potential pain and invasions of body integrity, so cause fear responses. An evolved tendency to be wary or fearful of corpses (which could carry disease or indicate nearby dangers, as well as just being upsetting) may be behind the “uncanny valley” effect,
¹⁵
where computer animations or robots that look
almost
human but not quite seem sinister and disturbing, whereas two eyes slapped on a sock is fine. The near-human construct lacks the subtle details and cues an actual human has, so seems more “lifeless” than “entertaining.”

4

Think you're clever, do you?

The baffling science of intelligence

What makes the human brain special or unique? There are numerous possible answers, but the most likely is that it provides us with superior intelligence. Many creatures are capable of all the basic functions our brain is responsible for, but thus far no other known creature has created its own philosophy, or vehicles, or clothing, or energy sources, or religion, or a
single
type of pasta, let alone over three hundred varieties. Despite the fact that this book is largely about the things the human brain does inefficiently or bizarrely, it's important not to overlook the fact that it's clearly doing something right if it's enabled humans to have such a rich, multifaceted and varied internal existence, and achieve as much as they have.

There's a famous quote that says, “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.” If you look into the science of the brain and how it relates to intelligence, there's a strong element of truth in this aphorism. Our brains make us intelligent enough to recognize that we
are
intelligent, observant enough to realize this isn't typical in the world, and curious enough to wonder why this is the case. But we don't yet seem to be intelligent enough to grasp easily where our intelligence comes from and how it works. So we have to fall back on studies of the brain and psychology to get any idea of how the whole process
comes about. Science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works? This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I'm not smart enough to tell.

Confusing, messy, often contradictory, and hard to get your head round; this is as good a description of intelligence itself as any you're likely to find. It's difficult to measure and even define reliably but I'm going to go through how we use intelligence and its strange properties in this chapter.

My IQ is 270 . . . or some other big number

(Why measuring intelligence is harder than you think)

Are you intelligent?

Asking yourself that means the answer is definitely yes. It demonstrates you are capable of many cognitive processes that automatically qualify you for the title of “most intelligent species on earth.” You are able to grasp and retain a concept such as intelligence, something that has no set definition and no physical presence in the real world. You are aware of yourself as an individual entity, something with a limited existence in the world. You are able to consider your own properties and abilities and measure them against some ideal but currently-not-existing goal or deduce that they may be limited in comparison to those of others. No other creature on earth is capable of this level of mental complexity. Not bad for what is basically a low-level neurosis.

So humans are, by some margin, the most intelligent
species on earth. What does that
mean
, though? Intelligence, like irony or daylight-saving time, is something most people have a basic grasp of but struggle to explain in detail.

This obviously presents a problem for science. There are many different definitions of intelligence, provided by many scientists over the decades. French scientists Binet and Simon, inventors of one of the first rigorous IQ tests, defined intelligence as: “To judge well, to comprehend well, to reason well; these are the essential activities of intelligence.” David Weschler, an American psychologist who devised numerous theories and measurements of intelligence, which are still used today via tests such as the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, described intelligence as “the aggregate of the global capacity to act purposefully, to deal effectively with the environment.” Philip E. Vernon, another leading name in the field, referred to intelligence as “the effective all-round cognitive abilities to comprehend, to grasp relations and reason.”

But don't go thinking it's all pointless speculation; there are many aspects of intelligence that are generally agreed on: it reflects the brain's ability to do . . . stuff. More precisely, the brain's ability to handle and exploit information. Terms such as reasoning, abstract thought, deducing patterns, comprehension; things like this are regularly cited as examples of superior intelligence. This makes a certain logical sense. All of these typically involve assessing and manipulating information on an entirely intangible basis. Simply put, humans are intelligent enough to work things out without having to interact with them directly.