New World New Mind

New World New Mind

In the first chapter, the author talks about how most people's attention is on eye-catching images, instead of what is going on in the world. People care more about murders, airplane crashes, etc. instead of the exploding populations or the growth in the amount of nuclear weapons that exist. Because of this, our environment starts to deteriorate. The environment will continue to deteriorate, and such events will be out of control until the human race realizes just how selectively the environment persuades the human mind, and how the biological and cultural history determines our comprehension. The book is about fundamental connections to our past and how the human race can "retrain" for a new world of the future. The book's intent is to help people from all walks of life, educators, decision makers, physicians, businessmen, etc., change the way they make decisions. People might begin to change and secure the human future if they understood the fundamental roots of the many problems we face. At no point in history, has the human race had the power to destroy its civilization and ruin a lot of the planet's life-support systems in a matter of hours. Over the past three decades scientific evidence developed many forms of the nature of both the human mind and predicament, and has now pointed to the way to the changes needed. The evidence of this has been from many different forms of studies, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, climatology, geochemistry, and cognitive science.

Our nervous system has been evolved to select only a small portion of reality, and to ignore the rest; hence why we don't perceive the world as it truly is. Our nervous system is affected only by dramatic changes, instead of conveying everything about the world. This makes us sensitive to the beginning and ending of most events, forgetting and overlooking the greater changes that happen in the middle. The author's point of this is that many of the dilemmas of our society come from the way the human race responds to, simplifies, and caricatures reality in their minds. The continuous expansion of the immense arsenals doesn't get the same attention that the first weapons and explosions did. The attacks and mushroom clouds on Hiroshima and Nagasaki received much more attention than the continuous growth of the nuclear weapon stockpile. However, the question as to "why" humanity hasn't tried vigorously to preserve the earth that all living things depend upon arises. The human race continues to build and develop more nuclear weapons, that within a short amount of time can and will destroy the very planet that we live on, the environment that we depend upon. The problem can't and won't be solved by the next politician to take office, or the next educational critique. The problem's roots are much deeper than most people realize. To find the roots of the problem, one must trace history in the world that made us, the human race. Some say that scientists recognized the evolutionary mismatch many years ago, but their findings have had little effect. The power of destructiveness from the human race is far greater, many years after the explosions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the thought processes of the human race still remain unchanged. In the book, the authors will talk about threats. The dangers to us, to civilization, and to the capacity of the earth to support the human race, that all exist because the human race has changed the environment of the world so drastically. They state that they will concentrate on the difficulties the human mind has in interpreting and perceiving the new kinds of threats and how to respond appropriately to them.

There are three parts to the human dilemma. The first is that the world in which created the human race, is now gone. And the new world in which we have developed is new, and we have little capacity to understand it. The second part is the benefits of evolving "quick reflexes" also accumulates today; in modern life, the human race must also react rather quickly. The third part to the human dilemma is that all nonhuman species have evolved to survive their physical habitats, and the human species originally evolved to do this as well. However, human beings have altered the world more in the last ten thousand years, than the ancestors did in the first four million years. We have changed the environment to fit our needs, instead of changing our needs to fit the environment. Most importantly, humans have built entirely new environments, such as farms, villages, cities and towns. The cycling pattern of human expansion and creations has changed the human race from small groups of hunters and gatherers, into a very complex civilization.

Most human ancestors evolved biologically, meaning the changes were encoded into our genes, happening over thousands of years. During recent history, the adaptations of the human race have taken place by means of cultural change. Examples of the cultural change are the invention of agriculture, cities, industry and technology. Cultural evolution and change happens at a much faster pace than biological evolution. Cultural evolution can make changes in a decade, or less. As a result, humans are losing control of the future. Changes that take place over the years has threatened the civilization. Although the human race is evolving, just as every other species does, our brain won't change biologically in time to help us solve the problems. Our brains have evolved enough to understand a small piece of the world, the piece that affects our ability to survive and reproduce.

If one wants to comprehend the cultural and biological factors that shape the human world, one would need to look back in time and comprehend why evolution favored the ancestors with limited perceptions and quick reflexes. Only then will we know why it is important to expand the human perceptions and add slow reflexes to our behaviors. The human brain is a vertebrate brain, and the mental structure has evolved to confront short-term phenomena. The human brain is based on the early primates' brains. All