Our Monkey Brains

TED – Laurie Santos

I like what this gal is saying – because I have been saying much the same thing myself .

She starts off by asking why we are sometimes so stupid. Does our environment make us stupid, or are we stupid to begin with? Since she studies primate psychology, she devised some clever tests to see if monkeys make the same mistakes we do.

Frankly, the tests themselves were a little too much for me to understand. I would have to see the tests in print, and carefully think about them. But she seems to make a strong case – that some of our basic problems go back a long ways – about 35 million years, in fact.

Being relatively subtle, they haven’t been a problem until now – when it has become clear that we cannot cope with our advanced economy – which is more advanced than our brains are.

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