What’s under the hood of our actions and thoughts?
The world feels like a darker and more dangerous place at the moment. Where does one even start? As seemingly unending horror unfurls across our news feeds, we might well ponder John Steinbeck’s reflection “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal”.
Perhaps then it is worth spending some time digging into the instincts that underpin our thoughts and actions.
Whether it is the car we buy, what we notice in the world, the impulse to “stand with” one side or another, or how we react to someone cutting us off in traffic — much human behaviour initiates from a set of instincts that have been burned deep into the circuitry of our brains through evolution. It is worth noting, by the way, that our brain’s objective is not happiness, thriving or world peace, but survival (and ongoing survival through procreation).
A lack of insight into what is really driving our choices means we can act in ways that are not in our long-term best interests — either societally or personally.
To bring intention to our actions, we have to be aware of what (really) drives us to act in certain ways. We need insight into who we are as human beings. Putting aside the obvious biological need to eat, sleep and procreate, what are the hot buttons that influence our thoughts and actions?
As social animals, who have evolved in hierarchical structures, there are three core social or externally oriented factors that stand out to me as deeply influential on our behaviours: status, tribe/belonging, threat. These are powerful social motivators, and businesses and politicians (and religions and terrorist groups, cult leaders and other social groups who seek power) are well versed in tapping into them.
But there are also other orientations our brains lean into and respond to “automatically” — novelty, purpose, beauty, self/identity, creativity, kindness, growth, the desire to feel alive. This is not an exhaustive list, but they are examples of things that capture our attentional networks and influence the choices we make.
How these impulses play out, or are rationalised post-activity, is shaped by the values that we inherit from the culture, time and place we are born and live in (none of which we consciously choose), and our individual personalities (at least half of which lies in the nature side of the nature/nurture debate). But still, they are instincts that seem common across humanity, and, at a minimum, status, tribe and the impulse to defend are shared with other social animals.
Although we don’t easily have access to these internal processes, we humans do have the capacity for meta-cognition — the ability to reflect more deeply on our thoughts, and our thoughts about our thoughts, and the choices we end up making. Despite having a loquacious left brain and a sense of a conscious self, which can easily manufacture rational (but not necessarily true) justifications for our behaviour, we are capable of taking a moment and thinking about what might really be driving our behaviour.
And taking time to reflect, as meditation experts will tell you, can help shape our responses. In neuroscience speak, the act of applying conscious thinking may help determine the goals that our inner processes work towards achieving, allowing us to be cognitively flexible. (Read more about this in Incognito, The Secret Lives of Brains by David Eagleman, if you’re interested).
In a world that seems ever more divided, enraged and unforgiving, it is worth pausing to think about what might really be driving our thoughts and decisions, and whether our actions are in the best interests of who we want to be and the world we want to live in. This might just enable us to access the inherent humanity (what we might call empathy) that lies within all of us “thinking animals”.
