Big Brains – Poisoned Chalice or the Key to Effective Change?

Part one of the Metacognition quartet

Thinking is not the exclusive realm of homo-sapiens, but alone amongst life forms, we have evolved the extensive capacity for metacognition – also commonly known as “thinking about our thinking”.

In this series of four articles, we will look at the nature of metacognition in order to understand why it plays such an important part in enabling us to become more effective in achieving our goals as Life Adventurers.

In this first article, we will review the evolution of thinking, and consider the novel idea that the rapid development of our “big brains” may not have constituted such a beneficial evolutionary jump as we are often inclined to think.

The big sprint

How did we start to think – and finally evolve to the point where we  are capable of  “think about our thinking”?

We started out with a brainstem handling basic functions such as the homeostatic regulation of breathing, for example. At this point our brain was comparable in function to that of a reptile.

Later the limbic portion of the brain grew around the stem giving us basic emotions and critical cognitive faculties such as memory and the capacity to learn.

Then finally about 100 million years ago, we pulled away from the competition with an evolutionary sprint. A relatively massive new brain layer (the neo-cortex) evolved around our older brain areas. As a result of this “recent” growth, our brains are now about three times larger than our nearest relatives – the apes. It is the neo-cortex that has made us distinctly “human” – with our increased intellectual capacity, and our ability for introspection and self-awareness – as manifested in our capacity for metacognition.

We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved beings – but we still share 96% of our genetic material with apes and 85% with mice. We like to think of ourselves as civilized because we have the capacity to think – but thinking does not necessarily equate with civilization. A cursory glance at the excesses of human history is enough to convince anyone of that.

So how are we really doing on the evolutionary scale, and just how helpful is our capacity for thinking?
Firstly we will consider the pessimistic view, and then we will look at the grounds for optimism for ourselves as Life Adventurers – and indeed as a species.

“Big Brains” – The poisoned chalice?

The term “poisoned chalice” is applied to something which appears to be good when it is initially received, but eventually turns out to be either bad or a mistake.

Not everyone is enamoured and awe-struck by our great cognitive leap.
The author Kurt Vonnegut was in no doubt – we are on the down-escalator.

Kurt’s greatest strength as a novelist (and a source of much of the humour in his work) is a form of child-like minimalism. Ideas and themes are reduced to their simplest forms. What happens when a child narrates? The child states the obvious truth in a way that even adults can finally see. And what is seen is usually depressing, absurd, and unflattering to homo-sapiens. The emperor truly has no clothes.

In his novel Galapagos, Kurt depicts a bleak evolutionary scenario in which our “big brains” are actually the cause of our eventual demise as a species rather than an evolutionary accelerator. Big-brained humans have done the unthinkable and deployed nuclear weapons.

Fast-forward to the action one million years in the future, and only a few survivors remain… on the Galapagos Islands. Survival of the fittest has sent us into an evolutionary tailspin. Clever types who could concoct weapons of mass destruction, and could lie and cheat, are gone. The dumb prospered and got dumber, became penguinesque, less dangerous to themselves and their environment, and really good at catching fish.

Brains got down-sized.
Thinking and creativity did not survive as successful traits.

Kurt’s message in a nutshell; Intelligence in the form of big brains is an evolutionary mistake.
Our intelligence is derailing us rather than propelling us to evolutionary stardom.

We are doomed to destroy ourselves and everything around us – simply because our extra neo-cortex gave us the capacity to do so. We are a lethal cocktail of global impact brain power and primal emotions such as extreme territoriality. In Kurt’s world, the fact that our emotional centre came before our intellectual capacities is important. In the hierarchy of the brain, emotions beat intellect hands-down in a crisis. The red button gets pushed.

Kurt may be proved right – but there is room for optimism. Not because Kurt’s analysis is faulty, but because our “big brains” gave us more than just the capacity to think and to tool up for destruction on a grand scale.

Kurt’s analysis focuses only on the destructive disadvantages of our cognitive capacities. His portrayal of our behaviour is essentially deterministic; Cause and effect.
If “A” happens then we do “B”… and we are always going to do “B” – trapped in our evolutionary rut.

However, if we look closely at this logic, we can formulate it slightly differently. It was not big brains that caused our demise in Galapagos, but our failure to overcome our existing ineffective emotional states. What Kurt actually portrayed was our “primitive”, maladaptive emotions hijacking or overriding our intellectual capacity… to do something really self-defeating!

In other words, we were defeated by the primacy of our “reptile” and emotional brains, the older portions of the brain, rather than by the addition of the neo-cortex which allowed us potentially to do more damage by building more powerful tools and weapons. The weapon was neutral… but unfortunately it was a big weapon. Factors such as hostility, territoriality, group-behaviour, lack of empathy, and a breakdown in rational thought drove us to press the button.

Evolutionary escape

So where are the grounds for optimism?
What else did we pick up for free with the recent growth of our big brains?

We gained the capacity for metacognition – the capacity to access, analyse, understand, and change the way we think. This capacity gives us the potential to change ourselves, to become relatively autonomous, and thereby to break out of our evolutionary rut.

In the second of our three articles entitled Metacognition-Lite, we will review the basics of metacognition and get a better insight into what the concept really means – and how it can help us to become more effective at achieving our goals, whatever they may be.

© Patrick Geever – All rights reserved.
Please contact the author for permission to use this article.