Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

Learning through domestication entails the transfer of knowledge and practices that are not always evident, either in terms of their purpose or origin. In the case of roasting Australian ‘bush tucker’, this practice was how to safely prepare food, but other examples include hunting and childbirth, both potentially life-threatening activities associated with folk wisdom. Of course, much folklore also contains superstition and irrational beliefs, but as we will discover in the following chapters, there is a strong imperative to copy what those around you say and do, especially when you are a child.

As a developmental psychologist, it is my view that childhood plays a major role in understanding the cultural evolution of our species. I usually tell my students at the University of Bristol the oft-cited finding that animals with the longest rearing periods tend to be the most intelligent and sociable. They also tend to be found in species that pair-bond for life rather than those that have multiple partners and produce many self-sufficient progeny. So it should be no surprise that of all the animals on this planet, humans spend proportionally the longest period of their lives dependent on others as children, and then as parents investing large amounts of their time and effort in raising their own offspring. This is how our species has evolved.

Of course, that profile of extended parental rearing is not unique to humans, but we are exceptional in that we use childhood to pass on vast amounts of accumulated knowledge. No other species creates and uses culture like we do. Our brains are evolved for it. As the leading developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello once quipped, ‘Fish are born expecting water, humans are born expecting culture.’ Other animals have the capacity to pass on learned behaviours such as how to crack nuts or use a twig for prodding a termite hill, but none have the same ability to transmit wisdom that increases with complexity from each generation to the next. Our ancient ancestors may have taught their children how to make a simple wheel, but now we can teach our children how to build a Ferrari.

The ability to transmit knowledge requires communication. Other animals can also communicate, but only limited and rigid information; humans, with our unique capacity for generating language, can tell limitless stories – even fantastical ones that are literally out of this world. We can also speak, write, read and use language to reflect on the past or think about the future. And it is not just the complexity and diversity of human language that is unique. Language had to build upon an understanding and desire to share knowledge with others who, like us in the first place, were willing to learn. It required understanding what others were thinking. Communication is part of our domestication – we had to learn to live peacefully and cooperatively with others for the collective good by sharing resources that include knowledge and stories. We do not just educate our children – we also socialize them so that they become useful members of society governed by all the rules and behaviours that hold it together.

Of course, this does not mean that our species is necessarily peaceful. There are always tensions and struggles in a world of limited resources and individuals will group together to defend their position against members from another tribe. However, for the conflicts that arise between groups and among individuals, modern societies govern with a greater level of control through our morality and laws than previously experienced in our history. To be an accepted member of society, each of us must learn these rules as part of our domestication.

We are such social animals that we are completely preoccupied with what others think about us. No wonder reputation is paramount when it comes to feeling good about ourselves. The social pressure to conform involves being valued by the group because, after all, most success is really defined by what others think. This preoccupation is all too evident in our modern celebrity culture, and especially with the rise of social networking, where normal individuals spend considerable amounts of time and effort in pursuit of recognition from others. Over 1.7 billion people on this planet use social networking on the Internet to share and seek validation from others. When Rachel Berry, a character in the hit musical series Glee , about a performing-arts school, said ‘Nowadays being anonymous is worse than being poor’, she was simply echoing our modern obsession with fame and our desire to be liked by many people – even if they are mostly anonymous or casual acquaintances.

We have always preferred others for what they can do for us. In the distant past, it may have been the individual attributes of strength to bring home the bacon and fight off competitors or our capacity to bear and raise many children that were selected for, but those attributes are no longer essential in the modern world. In today’s society, it is as much strength of character, intellect and potential financial earning that most regard as desirable traits. Top of the list of qualities most of us would like to possess is high social status, which explains why many individuals who already are well off in every other domain of their life still seek the attention of others.

What others think about us is one of the most important motivations for why we do the things we do. Some of us may have moments of blissful solitude when we escape the rat race of modernity and pressure to conform, but most inevitably return to seek out the company and support of others. Deliberate ostracization can be the cruellest punishment to inflict on an individual, short of physical harm. Like domesticated foxes that escaped into the wild, we invariably need to return to the company of others.

Why is the group so important and why do we care about what others think? The Domesticated Brain shows that we behave the way we do because of how our brains evolved to be social. For humans, being social requires skills of perception and comprehension when it comes to recognizing and interpreting the activity of others but it also requires changing our own thoughts and behaviours to coordinate with theirs so that we can be accepted. This domestication as a species took place over the course of human evolution as self-selecting mechanisms shaped social behaviours and temperaments that were conducive to living in communities, but we continue to domesticate ourselves during the course of our own lives and especially during our most formative years as children.

Our brains evolved for living in large groups, cooperating, communicating and sharing a culture that we passed on to our children. This is why humans have such a long childhood: during this formative period, our brains can become acclimatized to our social environment. The need for social learning requires babies to pay special attention to those around them but also enough flexibility to encode cultural differences over the course of childhood. This enables each child to recognize and become a member of its own group. A child must learn to navigate not just the physical but the social world by understanding others’ unseen goals and intentions. We have to become mind readers.

We need to develop and refine skills that make us capable of reading others in order to infer what they are thinking and most importantly, what they think about us. Where possible, evidence from comparative studies is considered to reveal the similarities and differences we share with our closest biological cousins, the non-human primates. And of course, we focus on human children. Developmental findings that reflect the interplay between brain mechanisms and emergence of social behaviour are the key to understanding the origins and operations of the mechanisms that keep us bound together.