Biological Determinism = World is FCUKED
Yes, our brains evolved to have short focused attention. This means long focused attention is difficult for humans because our instinct is to constantly be on the lookout for prey, food, shelter, or mate.
Short spurts of attention helped our ancestors survive in the wild. Doing deep focused “work” would have resulted in failing to realize that they were being hunted. Boom! Next thing they know they’re inside the belly of a lion or jaguar. Unfortunately, for them, they aren’t Jonahs so God isn’t going to command the animal to spit them back up. But if he did… they’d come out in pieces! Good luck trying to find a mate.
Research in neuroscience continues to shed light on how the brain works. And we should continue doing more and more research. But the one problem is that those who interpret the findings tend to be deterministic. This is the sexy science thing to do. It’s not hard to imagine this as a science news article, “Your brain is very bad at attention, blame your ancestors.” Responsibility removed.
I refer to this as biological determinism. A biological deterministic interpretation of the world is a terrible outlook. Pessimistic and rational. You are X because of Y. And so you don’t need to work on it.
Biological determinism has a tendency to create excuses and limit people on their behalf. “I can’t do X because it’s not who I am.” Or “I can’t do Y because neuroscience says Z.”
If we all became biological determinists then the world is fcuked. We’d cease making progress in quantitative science, art, literature, philosophy, politics, or technology.
The reason we make progress, breakthrough, overturn old paradigms, create new solutions to problems, is because specific people decided to control their own output. They controlled what they did and how efficient they were with their time. Certainly, it may make things more difficult, but that doesn’t mean they are impossible to achieve.
If people of old had listened to the latest interpretation of neuroscience research, then they would walk away thinking that humans have short focused attention so there’s no point in trying. And they wouldn’t have spent hours contemplating the problem because, well, contemplation it hard.
We have to be careful not to allow new science fads to determine who we become and what we do. If you have a short attention span, then work on increasing it. If you’re naturally a rational pessimist, then work on being a rational optimist. Avoid becoming a biological determinist. Become instead an individual determinist.