Evolution and survival

The design of the primitive mind: threat detection

If we analyze the human mind from an evolutionary perspective, we discover that it was not designed for happiness, self-actualization or inner peace.

It was designed for a single priority purpose: survival of the individual and the group.

Our ancestors who survived were not those who stood gazing at the beauty of flowers nonchalantly, but those who were paranoid, who saw dangers where there were none and who always anticipated the worst.

Imagine two hominids on the African savannah thousands of years ago. They hear a rustling in the tall grass.

One thinks, "I'm sure it's the wind" and relaxes. The other thinks, "I'm sure it's a predator" and runs away.

If it was the wind, the second one only lost a little energy, but if it was a lion, the first one was eaten and did not pass on its genes.

We are descendants of those who fled, of those who worried excessively.

Our modern mind has inherited that negativity bias: it is a machine for detecting problems, judging what is wrong and foreseeing catastrophes.

The problem is that, in the modern world, the "lions" are no longer physical, but symbolic (an email from a boss, a disapproving look, a bill), but the mind reacts with the same biological alarm, keeping us in a state of chronic stress from threats that do not put our physical life at risk.

Comparison of responses: the animal vs. the verbal human

The crucial difference between the stress response in animals and humans lies in the duration and the trigger.

When a gazelle escapes from a cheetah, it experiences a brutal spike in adrenaline and terror.

However, once the predator is gone and the gazelle is safe, its nervous system quickly regulates and it returns to calm grazing.

She doesn't sit around ruminating, "What if the cheetah comes back tomorrow?", "Was I fast enough?", "What will the other gazelles think of my running?". He lives in the present contingency.

The human being, endowed with language, is not so lucky. If a person suffers a mugging (the threatening event), he suffers not only during the mugging.

Months later, he may be in bed, totally safe, and his mind reconstructs the scene, analyzes what he did wrong, imagines alternative scenarios and projects future muggings.

The verbal mind keeps the threat alive long after it has disappeared from the physical world. We turn a painful one-time event into chronic torture.

This feedback loop, where thought reactivates emotion and emotion feeds more catastrophic thoughts, is unique to our species and is the price we pay for our capacity for language and abstraction.

Summary

The human mind was not evolutionarily designed for happiness or peace, but for the primary purpose of ensuring the survival of the individual by detecting dangers in the environment.

We have inherited a strong negativity bias from our ancestors; our modern mind functions as a constant radar of problems, anticipating catastrophes and continuously judging to protect us from threats.

Unlike animals, human language keeps threat alive long after it disappears, turning one-off painful events into chronic suffering through rumination and worry.