Are our Brains Wired for a Virtual World?

How our brain’s wiring shows us what we’re made for

Negativity does indeed dominate the news as I outlined in last month’s article on negativity bias. This is because we have a natural propensity to notice the negative – the threats and dangers in our environment. This is how we are “wired” or have a natural tendency for this. The reasons are obvious. It is better to attend to the negative because the negative can pose a survival threat more so than the positive. Proverbially we can wait to eat those berries until after the tiger is gone – better to pay attention to the tiger first.

This highlights that our brains are wired in certain ways, and this translates into how we attend to the world and how we respond to circumstances in our environment. Our brains developed from a long lineage of hominoids and modern human beings arose something like 200’000 years go on the African Savannah – according to what we now know. This means that for about 188’000 years we survived without agriculture and large congregations of people. We survived without cities for about 195’000 years and only recently developed large cities and public transport of any scale. And the internet has only been with us for about 30 years.

So, as it has been said many times in many places our brains were not designed to be doing the sort of stuff we do every day in the virtual world. Indeed, in evolutionary psychology the saying goes: our modern skull houses a stone age mind.

So, given this, how well can we truly cope with life in a virtual or hybrid world?

Let’s review some of the factors.