LivingDisadvantages of being urban cavemen

Disadvantages of being urban cavemen

The politician and philosopher Marco Tulio Cicero (106-43 BC) is a symbol of our civilization. He was one of the most influential people in the public life of the Roman Empire and pulled the strings of power together with such iconic figures as Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marco Antonio. He became famous for his oratory, subtle and Machiavellian, with which he handled all the variables of a complex society that laid the foundations of the modern world. In a way, it is the paradigm of the civilized human being. However, he put aside all those dialectical games and forcefully defined our closeness to the wild when he wrote: “What an ugly beast the ape is and how much it resembles us .”

Two thousand years later, the quote has been used by Max Brooks to open his novel Involution , in which a group of human beings who want to live a hypertechnological utopia end up getting carried away by their most primal side and behave like Paleolithic Homo sapiens. The same idea underlies both authors: although we live immersed in an artificial and sophisticated culture, inside we continue to have the same biology as in the age of the caves . This means that our hormones, our limbic system, or our cerebral cortex respond to many events in the same way as they would 300,000 years ago.

Science constantly scratches that civilized surface to enter our cave-dwelling interior. And he finds that a multitude of psychological phenomena that we believe are refinements of the XXI century are, in reality, behaviors that were fixed in the times that our species emerged, because they were adaptive. Some retain their effectiveness, others have lost it.

We can start with our first psychological mechanism: perception, the lever that helps us internalize what is happening around us … Does a current citizen looking for a taxi in New York use mechanisms similar to those of a hunter-gatherer in the Paleolithic savannah? ? Many researchers argue that it is, and that, in fact, that is the origin of stress , one of the great psychological problems in the world today.

Homo sapiens needs to find effective devices to select precisely and ignore everything that is not relevant. It is a need that goes way back in our evolutionary past. The psychologist David Perrett, from the University of Saint Andrews (Scotland), discovered that there is already a detector mechanism for biologically significant events in primates. It is like a visual encyclopedia made up of cells that analyze the stimuli that reach the brain and respond only to those that are important for survival. The same thing happened to the Paleolithic human: he had areas in his brain specialized in finding anomalous movements significant for our survival, threatening forms or facial features associated with predators. The rapid detection of these stimuli was essential for survival: from time to time, a certain event caught his attention in the midst of a placid life in which almost all stimuli could be classified as noise and very few as signal. And that promptly activated a state of alert.

The problem with Homo sapiens today, as claimed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, from Yale University (USA), is that it lives in a habitat that subjects it to a flood of data to discriminate, and that exceeds its capacity information processing . That is, he claimed, the cause of the stress level of the modern world … And that Milgram passed away in 1984, before the age of the internet. Detecting a taxi that is approaching among a multitude of cars, choosing a song among the infinite possibilities offered by an application while we cross a street exercising or searching among thousands of candidates in a contact app are just some of the thousands of examples of daily acts that demand our attention.

The same idea is found in the studies of Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan (USA). His research has led him to think of modern man as an animal with the psychological resources of a Paleolithic Homo sapiens to which a layer of civilization varnish has simply been applied. The greatest demonstration that this is a correct image is the beneficial effects that the return to the original environment in which our care patterns arose on us produces. Kaplan’s experiments show, for example, improvements in memory levels or task execution after a walk in a quiet place. The hypothesis of this scientist is that the most stressful urban environments –streets with fast traffic, crowds, etc.– force a continuous work of involuntary attention, which is activated by fundamental stimuli for our survival. This continuous flow eats away mental energy and hinders direct and voluntary attention, which focuses on what we want to attend to. That is why our mind rests when we walk through nature . In fact, it is enough to see the photograph of a landscape for the relaxing effect to take place.

The question of the perception of isolated stimuli is the most basic example in which it becomes clear that modern man lacks psychological resources, because his internal evolution has been much slower than external changes. And the issue gets complicated when we think about how we put these stimuli together in our mind. During the first moments of Homo sapiens on the planet, his brain evolved to unite isolated information and complete it with data that our psyche invents to compose a meaningful global structure. This is the hypothesis of scientists such as Christopher French, a psychologist at the University of London (United Kingdom), who has studied the mechanisms of pareidolia , the illusion that makes us perceive an ambiguous stimulus as something definite. French claims that, from the point of view of natural selection, finding coherence where there is only arbitrariness was an adaptive device for thousands of years. Seeing a Smilodon, that is, a saber-toothed tiger, where there were only branches swaying in the wind was not an obstacle to survival. The vital disaster, in fact, would have been that the caveman needed to see the entire figure of a predator to be aware of its presence.

In the modern world, we continue to use that mechanism which is quite useful to us. It serves to be able to understand millions of conversations that we have only half listened to, to try to find a pattern in the changes of the stock market or to choose a career through the data that comes to us about the possible exits that it has. But this lack of tolerance for uncertainty can also be a bad strategy on many occasions in a world as complex as the current one . During the covid-19 pandemic, we have seen a lot of maladaptive phenomena related to this need to complete the figure, to give a global sense to what is happening, and to invent the data that we lack to square our previous hypotheses. Fake news, rumors that spread more strongly than contrasted realities, denial and conspiracy visceral reactions … The human being of the 21st century is assimilating the coronavirus with cognitive strategies similar to those of a Homo sapiens of the Magdalenian culture. And that happens because the pandemic has accentuated another element that leads us to connect with the caveman in us: fear.

Since Darwin’s pioneering book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals , science has investigated the adaptive origin of human sentimentality. Indeed, we are descendants of those who expressed anger and thereby stopped abuses that would have made them less adapted to the environment. Also of those who expressed joy, because in this way those around us feel compelled to return to provide us with certain experiences that lead us to evolutionary success. Our ancestors gave rise to us thanks to the fact that their expressions of love made them more attractive in the eyes of those they chose as a sexual partner. Even the manifestations of sadness were adaptive for our ancestors, since thanks to them they aroused pity in those who could help them survive.

But, although many of these adaptive needs are still valid, the environment has changed and has made certain feelings outdated. Emotions were shaped in a collectivist age, in which all of our ancestors led similar lives. What saddened, angered, or embarrassed a Paleolithic individual had the same effect on others. And that is why the transmission of the information was so useful. But today the life of people – who previously had uniform rates of maturation, search for material goods and reproduction – is increasingly diverse. The goals of a 35-year-old American urban middle-class single with a workaholic are nothing like those of a man of the same age, African, married with six children, living in a rural setting. Neither are their fears.

However, the pandemic has put on the table that it is possible to awaken the fears that beat in our atavistic biology. And it is that ancient horrors survive in us. A classic example: when in the experiments a group of children are asked which animal scares them the most, snakes or spiders always appear first … even if they live in an area of the planet where there are no poisonous snakes or arachnids. In fact, it is a fear that we do not learn from others. Neither we nor our evolutionary cousins, the primates. This was demonstrated in an experiment by Michael Cook and Susan Mineka, from the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University, Illinois (USA). When they showed a group of Rhesus macaques videos in which a relative reacted with fear to a snake, all of them learned to be afraid of snakes. But if the protagonist of the video showed the same reaction to a flower, it did not become a feared object.

There are fears for which we are biologically programmed from our origins as a species. And that ancestral origin can make our fear little adapted to the environment. As Richard McNally of Harvard University points out, humans quickly learn to fear snakes, spiders, and cliffs . Any negative association accelerates those fears, because that almost certainly helped our ancestors survive. However, we are less predisposed to fear cars, electricity, weapons or global warming , which are much more dangerous. The environment in which humans live changes faster than their biology, and that can make our fears maladaptive. Many people are reacting to a global pandemic that affects, above all, urban environments with feelings of panic very similar to those of the men of the Stone Age. And perhaps that is not the most rational way to tackle a 21st century problem.

Another of the great gaps between the demands of the modern world and our atavistic nature is the theme of love. Our culture has tried to give that sentiment a civilized patina, but researchers like the American anthropologist and biologist Helen Fisher show us that it is actually little more than a question of finding the right biochemistry to maximize the survival of our genes. Fisher insists, for example, on the role played by smell, perhaps because it is the most primary sense. Olfactory memory is the one most directly associated with the visceral. We kiss to exchange fluids, gauge our biological compatibility, and subtly smell each other – the kiss is a civilized bite . This scientist from Rutgers University (USA) reminds us that the feeling of falling in love comes shortly after the first deep kiss on the mouth. However, the modern human being has devised a huge paraphernalia to wrap this feeling and to be able to think that it responds to more rational causes.

To delude ourselves we use a mental mechanism: the Halo Effect. We associate the caveman attractive sensations with more sensible ones that have not really had an effect. For example, when an individual seems handsome to us, we tend to believe that he is a successful person in life. In this way, we can think that we have chosen that couple because we like their entrepreneurial capacity and their self-confidence, not their smell of biochemical compatibility.

Not surprisingly, Fisher’s research shows that people with an “evolutionarily successful candidate” smell – due to their antibodies, pH, and other biological factors – appear similar to us in scale of values, sexual prowess, and sense of humor. . As this scientist reminds us, by the simple fact of being close to the loved one we secrete dopamine, a hormone that produces pleasant sensations, even if we do not like what is happening . And that leads us to emit phrases like “I understand myself very well talking to him”, “I have never enjoyed so much with anyone in bed” or “I laugh a lot with her: we have the same sense of humor” to explain our infatuation in the XXI century. But, in reality, the thing works the other way around: the previous chemical storm makes us believe that we share values, sexual tastes and laughter.

Obviously, the caveman in us does not help us much to do a good emotional casting. The halo effect dilutes everything. But, in addition, it prevents us from relating in an assertive way. For example: it is very difficult to ask our candidate about compromising issues, because our hormones always seek to create a pleasant climate by carpeting the floor for our potential partner. The only thing our atavistic biology fears is infidelity. But it also does so based on significant reasons in our evolutionary past that are now completely out of date.

In the 21st century, the adaptive thing is to trust our partner and understand that, if the other person has an external relationship –sexual or emotional–, we will talk about it when it occurs and we will make rational decisions about the future of the relationship. But David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas (USA), wanted to find out how the caveman that inhabits us works and asked a wide group of people belonging to different cultures throughout the planet to evoke a love relationship . Later, she asked them to feel how a sexual and emotional infidelity would affect them and decide which one they found most disturbing. The result was striking: gender differences were found in all cultures. The men were much less forgiving of a sexual affair, but were more indifferent to a possible emotional bond outside the couple. The opposite was the case with women: they were more afraid of a parallel romantic relationship. Buss’s explanation ties in with our history as a species.

According to this researcher, jealousy was a product that had evolutionary success : we are descendants of those who avoided the loss of fundamental links for the survival of our genes. Men, to promote the reproductive success of their sperm, tended to sow them in as many women as possible. The opposite happened to them: they are conditioned as an evolutionary subject to care for their children, both due to the low number of eggs and the toll that pregnancy and breastfeeding entail. Therefore, if the procreation came from a purely sexual history, they ran the risk of being abandoned with the baby. The best strategy to optimize an egg is to do a good casting, and select a man whose sexual motivation is associated with love: this way, women would ensure that they get some of the precious eggs available. A man, however, can risk sperm due to their large numbers. But yes: you have to make sure that you are dedicating your breeding efforts to your own genes. That is, you have to make sure that the child is yours. The result is, according to the supporters of this theory, a different tendency in the jealousy of men and women: they fear sexual infidelity more, and women, emotional infidelity . Something that, in the modern world and with an equal partner, does not make any sense and raises multiple problems in relationships. Once again, the problem is in the slowness of evolution to eliminate the traces of the caveman that we drag.

Even the phenomenon that is talked about the most in the refined cultural products of our time may be a simple evolutionary residue. The vast majority of current novels, movies, and songs speak of an atavistic issue: the difficulty in going through the love-mourning process. Throughout prehistory – and until the beginning of the 20th century – life expectancy was less than forty years. Most people had only one stable relationship throughout their days. Love almost always ended when one of the members of the couple died, so the grief over the end of a relationship coincided with the mourning over the death of the other person. And that makes us very unprepared hormonally for the simple love duel: the end of a relationship when it stops making sense. Cultural products mythologize this process and make it a transcendental issue. But that does not make any sense in the modern world: life expectancy in our environment exceeds eighty years and it is very likely that we will have to face several break-ups throughout our lives .

As the psychologist Judith Viorst reminds us in her book Necessary Losses , in a world like ours, love grief techniques should be the subject of countless courses and workshops . But it’s not like that. In fact, the collective imagination continues to be flooded with victimhood and self-pity. We continue to listen to songs or watch series and movies in which the breakup in love, instead of being classified as what it is – a transitory state of months of melancholy followed by an euphoric feeling of liberation – is usually characterized as a heartbreaking tragedy that creates permanent trauma.

The Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato said that “the cultural process is a process of domestication that cannot be carried out without rebellion on the part of animal nature, eager for freedom.” The wild side is not going to stop manifesting itself because we ignore it and disregard its visceral impulses. If we want to channel it to adapt it to the needs of Homo sapiens in the 21st century, we first have to know it. Because only what is previously accepted is transformed .

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