Big Think - Why sex, food, and shelter aren’t enough for Homo Sapiens | Agustín Fuentes
Human infants really can’t do very much for themselves. A baby giraffe is born and you know, in a couple hours, it’s off, it’s running. Human infants-nothing. They’re just laying there. Why are human infants like this? One of the critical reasons, evolutionarily speaking, is because it takes so long for the human brain to develop. So it turns out, that unlike almost all other mammals, our brain, when we’re born, it’s only about 40% of its adult size. So, the human brain develops in the world outside the womb. This really long childhood means that our brains are always social, always in this dynamic with other humans, with other animals, and the environment. And in fact, that environment becomes part of who we are. (So much so that our health - both mental and physical - is dependent on our community, like described in Outliers - extended families, better health outcomes)
So the brain isn’t complete right out of the oven, which means it will develop and evolve with its environment. It also means that it is dependent on others as it needs someone to learn from. That allows us to do some stuff that I think is not seen in other animals- and one of those is this incredible human capacity for belief. That is, this ability for humans to take our experiences, our imaginations, and put them together into ideas, or ideologies, or perceptions- and commit to them. Commit to a perception or idea or a person or a thing so fully, that it becomes our reality. If I pulled out a $20 bill, most people in the world would be like, “I know what that that is. I know what that means.” It means something, ‘cause we all believe it means something. This is a piece of paper! And yet, all of us have this capacity to invest so fully to make it a fact; real in the world.
Our hormones, our neurons, our muscles, the enzymes in our microbiome in our guts actually respond to the way in which we believe the world is and how that affects us.