Black-and-White Thinking The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World

Kevin Dutton, Theo Solomon

eAudio - 2021

A groundbreaking and timely book about how evolutionary biology can explain our black-and-white brains, and a lesson in how we can escape the pitfalls of binary thinking.Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk: the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment—a drop in temperature, the crack of a branch—was essential to our survival as a species.Since then, the world has evolved—but we, for the most part, haven't. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency t...o "force quit:" to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeon-hole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none. In our modern,... more