Brains and human behaviour
We are living in a golden age of scientific discovery about the most complex thing in the universe, our own brains.
The new discoveries are telling us that its never too late to use it in new productive ways. Understanding how it has evolved and how it works helps us to reform our mental models. These in turn drive our own behaviour, our interactions with other people and the world we find ourselves in.
New research reveals a facinating journey into why we behave in the way we do and discover the intangible, unspoken rules that ultimately determine our social interactions.
By looking inside our heads at the architecture of the brain and outside at our social and consumer behaviour we can begin to see how and why our human nature has evolved. We can start to get a grasp of the constant organisation and reorganisation that goes on inside our heads as we try to make sense of the world.
We can see that a brain that has developed to meet the demands of our early origins is still with us. It is an imperfect brain that is ill adapted for the demands of the complicated world we live in now.
However the more we can understand our clumsy nature, the more we can do something about it.
So we do screw up … but we get along.
And, surprisingly, science has discovered that we are driven not to feel good but to look good. As social animals we are keen to display our core human traits, intelligence, personality and evolutionary fitness to those around us.
