A Stone Age brain in the Digital Age

Do you sometimes feel out of place in this world? Do you feel that life has become too complex, with countless sources of anxiety? If so, you are not alone.

Belonging to today's society can be a puzzle. Rules, Laws, Norms, Guidelines and Requirements that appear and change every day. We are exposed to astronomical volumes of information pointing one way and, equally, in the opposite direction. Threatened on every front by the countless crises the media bring us daily. I do not believe there is a single sector that has not already been described as being in crisis… A climate crisis, an energy crisis, an economic and financial crisis, a political crisis, a public health crisis, a food crisis, a social crisis, and so on.

Being human today can be very challenging, and the human mind did not evolve to deal with the complexity of the modern world. Homo sapiens is thought to have emerged around 200,000 years ago; our body and mind represent this species' extraordinary adaptation to the environment of that time, when what mattered was finding food and shelter and avoiding predators. The development of the human brain did not anticipate the need to solve less immediate problems such as the various crises, diseases and pandemics, rising interest rates or the annual tax return…

Although we are the most evolved species on the planet, we still have a Stone Age brain. Society has evolved exponentially, but mind and body have not kept pace, creating a mismatch or lag. According to evolutionary psychology, this mismatch occurs when a species is exposed to an environment that changes rapidly and to which body and brain have no time to adapt.

In particular, the human mind and body are adapted to the physical and social conditions in which our primitive ancestors lived 200 millennia ago, having to survive hunger, insect and spider bites, predators, violence and high infant mortality.

Around 10,000 years ago agriculture emerged and humans began to settle permanently, growing crops and domesticating animals, generating a “big bang” in the evolution of human society that body and brain did not keep up with.

One example of this lies in our food choices and tendencies. Today's diet offers great nutritional variety, yet we retain a preference for sweet, fat-rich foods. We now know these are unhealthy foods, but millennia ago these highly calorific foods ensured survival by guaranteeing that we stayed alive until the next meal, which we never knew when would come.

Our nervous system evolved to survive predators that demanded an immediate reaction. If we came across a bear or a lion, fight-or-flight (or freeze) mode was triggered to ensure survival. Nowadays we run no risk of meeting a crocodile around the corner or a tiger in the playground, yet we react to inflation or the gas bill as if they were predators. Our current threats are psychosocial and demand far greater cognitive resources. We cannot run away from the electricity bill, we cannot fight bank interest rates, nor freeze in front of the tax return.

It is worth noting that, physiologically, the fight/flight/freeze response is linked to the activity of the autonomic nervous system and is not under our conscious control. That is why, at times, we react inappropriately to a present-day situation without being able to stop ourselves from doing so.

With the amount of information we are exposed to in this digital age, it is easy to identify countless threats. This leads to overstimulation of the autonomic nervous system, which regularly triggers the fight/flight/freeze reaction with the corresponding physiological responses (increased heart rate, muscle tension, shallow breathing, and so on). These recurrent physiological responses lead to states of anxiety.

We call today's human Modern Man, but in reality we retain a mind that functions very much like that of Primitive Man. Living in a digital age with a Stone Age brain creates a mismatch that inevitably induces stress, anxiety and even depression, and we need strategies that allow us to update the way we process the volume of information and the technological challenges we currently face. Some of these strategies include keeping in contact with nature, nurturing our connections with others, exercising the body, limiting social media and screen exposure, and living more in the present — the life that is actually happening.