Why people need reasons for their beliefs and decisions.
A few days back I was attending another online learning session which began by posing this question to its audience “Why do people want reasons for their beliefs and decisions?”
I believe that humans are primarily emotional animals and their first response to any situation in their immediate environment is an emotional response. Current research in neuroscience suggests that even decisions that we make primarily originate in the limbic system which is also the seat of all human emotions.
So, although evolution has modelled us such that our primary reaction to any situation is prima facie emotional, we have through conscious choices and social preferences conditioned ourselves to think and act otherwise.
Human beings consider themselves different from rest of the members of the animal kingdom because of their ability to reason. And by ability to reason I am referring to the human mind’s unique ability to ask the question “Why?” Though it has been reasonably demonstrated that primates can mimic and respond meaningfully to human behavior, or though it has been scientifically proven that primates can “think” in a certain manner or to a certain extent, they still have not been recorded as pondering on or asking the question “why”. Therefore, so far it is thought that the ability to ask a “why” question is very unique to the brain of the human species. Take away this ability of the human being and they would be grouped into one of the physically weakest and most vulnerable species on this planet.
This realization that if we, as a species, must survive, then we must exploit the strength of our reason and our ability to ask the question “why” has had lasting impact on the way the human brain has evolved. The prefrontal cortex which is the seat of reason and for rational thinking is a much later evolutionary appendage to the human brain. It is merely 359 million years old – rather recent on the evolutionary scale.
The self-conviction that we humans, at all times, must maintain and demonstrate this critical and dominant difference between ourselves and the rest of the world has transplanted itself into our social language and social preferences that we as a civilization subscribe to.
Since our rational skills proved to be a key differentiator and success factor while we were evolving and competing with other species for dominating the food chain, we have carried that same notion of dominance by employing our rational skills into our present-day civilization.
Our present-day civilization so much overemphasizes the importance and abilities of our prefrontal cortex that we have built a culture of grading and differentiating our fellow humans using this as the primary if not sole yardstick. Take, for instance, one of the founding pillars of our present-day civilization – our education system, which is exclusively built around developing and measuring the performance of our rational abilities at frequent intervals. And through most of the first twenty-five years of a person’s life, which is also the most important developmental and growth phase, it lays the behavioral and intellectual foundation for the person to live by for the rest of his or her adult life. It is therefore not surprising that only very recently we have started realizing the importance and dynamic nature of EQ score over a much narrower and more static IQ score.
During the foundational phase if a person is not able to demonstrate the abilities of the prefrontal cortex then often the system lets the person fall behind or even face social discrimination. Think about how some societies and cultures still treat those who, at school, fail in subjects like mathematics or science – domains which demand the most intense application of our rational faculties? Consider how our grading and rewarding systems at the foundation level (education institutes) are systematically and rigorously built to encourage and promote the most effective use of our rational abilities. Naturally, the social craze to either become an “Engineer”, “Doctor”, “Lawyer”, etc. if one is to be considered successful at all levels in life, still dominates popular imagination and ambition of large swaths of the educated population.
Social acceptance is a key necessity for the psychological survival of any human being. It was so when we were hunter – gatherers and the question was one of survival as a species. It still is when it is a question of survival through social acceptance and the question is one of survival as a professional. The average person must feel accepted and must have a sense of belonging if he or she is to lead a meaningful and happy life. An easy, quick, and conventional way to gain such social acceptance is by emphasizing and demonstrating one’s prefrontal cortex’s skills.
Essentially this culture is practiced often at the expense of developing many other key and more meaningful abilities of our brain, but whose eventual usefulness is not immediately obvious.
Indian movies like “Taare Zameen Par” or even “3 Idiots” are extremely critical about our obsession for rational faculties and the way we are encouraged to “learn” – especially during the formative stages and foundation years of our lives. These movies have played a significant role in highlighting (at least to the movie going population) about the limitations, pitfalls, and eventual dangers that we have created for large sections of our society who are not able to cope with the pressures and demands of a “logic centric” culture. It is only recently that studies of scholars like Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligence have started gaining acceptance within our educational establishments.
Our obsession with rational skills has an overbearing and almost intimidating influence on our thinking abilities.
First, they create thinking ruts or thought patterns which mask out important information emanating from significant parts of our immediate environment, but which our rational skills are unable to meaningfully process. Next, any sequence of events that do not fit neatly into a cause-and-effect relationship is either marked as coincidental or inconsequential.
Finally, when we are challenged with phenomena of feelings or emotions that often do not pass the test of rational scrutiny, they are deemed either as noumena or qualia. Implying that since they cannot be endorsed rationally through any of our available resources, they are not worth considering or recognizing as important. Note that in such cultures intuitive faculties or “feelings” of the mind are not considered as “available resources” for decoding these kinds of information, and therefore such data are quickly swept away as unnecessary in the weakest cases, or wishy – washy and unexplained in better cases, or as spiritual in the strongest of the cases.
A study exploring reasons why a large majority of Indian students choose to pursue Engineering as an academic discipline discovered that amongst other reasons, this academic choice offered the students a unique freedom to avoid dealing with emotions – since they would be trained to deal with machines and therefore can avoid dealing with people. They find it a lot easier interfacing with machines than with people.
The results of this study are insightful, as much as they portend how the human society will “feel” in the future. Because it defines, as a culture and a civilization what respect and importance do, we will place on “emotions” in our routine lives.
Concepts which should otherwise be natural and innate to the human mind given the fact how evolution has originally designed our brains to react to the world around us, now needs our conscious and focused attention. The primary reason why the cave man survived not just as a species but also as a persona, was that the cave provided “psychological safe place” so to speak, on which the hunter – gatherers could fall back on, or to which they could safely return at the end of every dangerous and often life-threatening hunting sorties and then share stories and feelings with each other as dictated by their old or limbic brain. The same need remains intact even today. Despite, becoming an exponentially civilized, and technologically advanced society with access to deep repertoires of knowledge and wisdom we still feel the urgent and immediate need to create “Psychological safe places” for ourselves, and for everybody in our immediate environment.
In conclusion I would want to draw your attention to the image of the sunglasses lying on the table. They don’t just lie on there; they have lied a lot too. I think of the sunglasses as the way I now look and think about my world. It is the shades of the rational thinking that my mind currently wears, decide what reaches my eyes, what I will see as mere shadows and what I shall never be able to see.
But when we remove those glasses, we would see the world from a most natural perspective, with a pair of eyes that integrates the analytical perspective that we so forcefully teach ourselves to learn with the intuitive perspective that evolution had originally designed for us.