Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa | Open Culture:

DC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a species?

SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.

The timing of the below column couldn’t be more perfect. I’ve been studying brain hemispheric bias and am concluding that one of the faults of our civilization is the manner in which we favor left brain thinking. If in our education strategies we can encourage balance between the hemispheres, I think our future survival will be assured. The piece is written by Leonard Shlain, author of the Alphabet and the Goddess, and discusses Bush’s smirk as a sign that his two brain halves are disconnected. He makes one major omission: Cheney smirks too. Could it be that we are on the verge of Armageddon because our so-called leaders are lobotomized? Our culture certainly is.

Leonard Shlain: Why Bush Smirks – Politics on The Huffington Post:

Also, there exists a marked contrast between the distribution of emotions to the right and left of the brain’s great divide. The majority of emotions have their seat in the right hemisphere but a few reside in the left. Optimism, cheerfulness, and happiness hold sway in the left frontal lobe. Anger, fear, terror, disgust, and sadness, are far more prominently represented in the right. The emotions in the right hemisphere are more primal and are highly attuned to instinctual “fight or flight” mechanisms necessary for a creature to stay alive in a dangerous environment.

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Most individual can coordinate both of their hemispheres to produce a symmetrical smile or frown. George Bush seems unable to accomplish this feat in his unguarded moments or when he becomes agitated. His lopsided smirk reveals an inner disconnectedness between the two sides of his brain. And the left sided scowl, and glaring left eye provides a more accurate window into his soul and psyche than does his smiling right. I would further speculate that this disconnect evident in his facial expression might have something to do with the president’s unprecedented syntactical mangling of the English language. Sentences inarticulately constructed often belie a disordering of thought processes.

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