Ever since the invention of computers, we have started to compare how we function with that new invention using analogies.

The brain is the hardware with short and long-term memory, and the processor speed determines how fast we can calculate.  You can have all kinds of critiques of this comparison, but that’s nitpicking. Simplifying difficult concepts makes it easier to spread the word, so to speak.

I made this short intro because I read in an old post of mine about the idea that we have to reboot our fleshy internal computer. The idea is that our brain has hardly evolved in the last 100,000 years or so. The way we think, feel, love, solve problems, and go through our daily ups and downs is still the same as the people who lived in makeshift shelters and were hunting for their food. Our brain has evolved over millions of years and still changes, but our modern society exists only in the smallest fraction and at the end of that long timescale. We feel all modern and clever with our fancy phones, but in 100,000 years, they will look back at us like we look at an ape that got hold of a phone in a zoo.

If you use the analogy of computers, then we are a late seventies computer running DOS. It can do most of the things we do now; the difference is that it was made for smaller packages, meaning less input and less demand for results. People look, on average, at hundreds of small videos and posts on social media each day, but studies show that we only “compute” a fraction of what we see. The rest clogs up the computer and prevents valuable processing time from doing other tasks. Now we see a hundred pictures and remember two; in the seventies, we could only download two pictures in the same time, and the excitement after a long wait made you remember both of them for sure. I made these numbers up, but I am 51, and when I was 16, we had no cable TV or computer and only two TV channels to watch. I know for sure that I have more input of information now than when I was younger. The internet can satisfy most of our (knowledge) needs, back then I had to wait till I could go to the library in the hope of finding what I wanted to know.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the internet, but if I could snap my fingers, I would change all the phones into nineties Nokias, and the internet was only Wikipedia, text-based homepages of institutions, and ad-free YouTube.

 Human societies are complex, and we all feel the need to simplify our lives and understand the world around us. The attraction of leaders who speak understandable “truths” that are easy to digest is still strong, even though our history shows that easy truths almost always end up in misery. The truth is complex, and the solutions to the problems in our society are also difficult. Simplifying helps, as  I stated in the beginning, but only in the first school day at school.

In my old post, I wrote, “Our mind needs a reboot and an upgrade to version 2.0, and throw in some better memory and dust it off.” Of course, I have no clue how you could upgrade us, but maybe it is a good thing to realize that we all are not up to speed for the time we live in.