Our brilliant, dissonant brains
Our brains did not originally develop to understand quantum mechanics, mathematics, poetry, extremely niche algorithmically determined TikToks, nor any other of the multitude of things that fill the modern world. However, true to the nature of life, the human mind has adapted and repurposed itself from a surviving machine to a living machine, with the capability to do all of the above and more
It would be naïve, however, to think that the brain is brilliantly infallible and perfectly adapted to the complex thoughts of contemporary society. You only need to give someone a tongue twister, show them a picture of a blue and white dress in ambiguous lighting or place something in their blind spot to expose our brains as the flawed, gelatinous ball of error-prone protein that they are. Don’t get me wrong, brains are smart. They’re one of the best computers in the world — possibly the universe — but when you show it a digitally altered upside-down image of Margaret Thatcher it’ll convince itself that she looks perfectly normal when that is definitely not the case.
You see, our brains have evolved to help us make sense of the world, spot patterns and differentiate between good and bad. Sometimes, to do that efficiently, the brain takes shortcuts. This is why, for example, we see faces in places where there are none. The brain is so incredibly fine-tuned to picking up the…
