Watch the performance envelope video
Though we really don't know very much about how the brain processes information - we have yet to be able to determine why you know your name - to give just one flagrant example - we are not clueless about how the brain works.
We know about its evolutionary performance envelope, for example.
These are the conditions upon which the brain processes information in the best way. The most efficient way. The most accurate way.
The human brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion.
That's so important I'm going to say it again.
The human brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion.
Let me drill down on this a little bit.
Its important to understand the human brain is the world's most sophisticated survival organ. It's built to keep its owner alive long enough to pass its owner's genes onto the next generation - a decidedly very Darwinian thing to say. There's the survival stuff.
This magnificent survival organ was forged in an outdoor crucible, probably and mostly in East Africa. For 99.987% of our time on the planet, we have lived in settings composed of natural elements, starting out in the savannah. We did it under conditions of increasing climatic instability - where our green, wet rainforest that used to inhabit our North African womb increasingly gave way to the not-as-green and not-as-wet savannah.
Because we were hunter-gatherers in an unstable ecological environment, we were moving around almost all of our waking hours. Some estimates put our movement at nearly 12 miles per day. Constant motion.
Those are the conditions under which our brain thrives. We have not escaped the blast radius of our evolutionary predilections forged over millions of years simply because we have - for the last few thousand - been able to live in sedentary cities.
Get the updated and expanded edition of John Medina's NYT bestseller Brain Rules. Learn more at www.brainrules.net
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1 comment:
So...when I'm sitting in a square 4 sided space gazing at a small box with pictures moving in it - with my body not moving - trying to get my brain to cooperate and problem solve - and it doesn't want to.....the reason is because I have not created the best conditions for it to work effectively.
Wow - makes sense. Get off my butt and move around outside with the "problem" and give it some space.
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