[~70,000BCE] - The Cognitive Revolution: Language and the birth of Art, Religion, Shame and Execution

The world around us is full of little miracles. Richard Ranum suggests that an overlooked one is the act of taking a flight not due to the magic of physics or the complicated flight network that makes it happen.

The real miracle is much more fundamental than that.

, To take an airplane, you must walk into the airport passing thousands of strangers. You cue politely and you rationally handle all sorts of little frustrations until you finally arrive, sealed in a metal box with 200 strangers.

At no point do you start biting them or punching or screaming, you don't jump on the snack cart as soon as it appears. In fact, if you need the toilet, you cue for it politely. The act of say, slinging some poo at your neighbor probably didn't ever cross your mind.

However, if this was 200 chimpanzee strangers locked in an airplane,

it would be a blood and fur tornado , within a matter of minutes.

Even a relatively calm chimp who can get on with his tribe will transform in reaction to seeing many unknown males around.

, He would need to establish his place in the hierarchy through the only form that he knows, which is violence. A dominant chimpanzee asserts rank through bludgeoning rivals, and let's. Sexual coercion of females

For humans. However, a relatively high standing or dominant male or female, if you will, can sit down, buckle up

and take instructions from the cabin staff , when the system requires it of them.

So what do we have to thank for our higher sensibilities? Why is there no poo slinging going on? Well, the cognitive revolution roughly 70,000 years ago gave us complex language

and the ability to cooperate, which sparked a great domestication process

with some surprising twists and turns along the way.

You might not have thought about it, but humans are the only species to blush, with embarrassment. we are also the least actively violent animal around, which so far sounds good. However, we are the most proactively violent animal around, and we've even invented all manner of tools and ideologies for systematic slaughter of our own species.

So that might not be the first thing that you think about when you hear the word teamwork. And we definitely have some exploring to do with this cognitive revolution

as we set sail to find out what really changed with it, why it mattered, and what it unlocked.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the How to Change the World Podcast where we study the history and future of innovation by chronologically journeying through the most impactful ideas and events that ever happened, learning what they changed and contributed to the world that we know today and what it possibly means to us tomorrow.

I'm your host, Sam Webster Harris, , and today we have some ambitiously large concepts to wrap our big heads around,

Language shapes the way that we think and determines what we can think about. Furthermore, language isn't just languages say such as Mandarin, Tamil, English , language is also smiles, winces, tone, gesture, our entire stack of signals, and I'm sure you know a flirty smile when the world blesses you with one.

Right? Well, the evolution of these miraculous encoding systems that allow us to transfer the thoughts in one person's head to another person's goes hand in hand with something else. The evolution of our imagination. And from that many things erupt such as art, religions, music, culture, and basically the birthing of society as we know it.

As we're also going to be finding out, creating some of the first forms,

Of systematic violence and execution. So, not withstanding to get through it all, this episode will be in four major parts.

Firstly, the fascinating technicals of how and why we develop language , and what went on in this cognitive revolution that gave us complex communication.

Secondly, what our newfound imagination started doing with all its powers and words.

Thirdly, the role of shame and execution in our great domestication event that letters from being uncooperative, chimps that are paranoid of strangers to a group of individuals who can sit on a plane in relative calmness.

And then finally. The journey of language to the present day and a peak into the future of the next possible cognitive revolution and communication revolution.

That could be just around the corner and no, I am not talking about ai.

As we do this, we'll be asking, what does this all mean for our concepts of collaboration and communication and what can it teach us today?

But Before we get into all that, I think we need to set this up by framing these affairs under the very sexy lens of the topic that I think we've all been waiting for.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about compression.

The Compression problem

you might not think about compression a lot, but I'm sure you think about many things in that curious mind of yours as you drift through the cosmos, with other minds around you that sometimes perhaps you want to communicate with well.

Every thought and idea that you have is a rich tapestry of impression, feelings. And when you try to appreciate the sheer scale of what is inside your mind, well, there are thoughts bursting with color motion, a single mood that can swell with the universe's intensity.

And if you wish to share any of those thoughts and feelings, you squeeze the infinite in your brain into the finite. Whatever idea or feeling that you wish to share must be channeled into speech one word at a time. So this river of thoughts in your head has to be pushed through this really small pipe that comes out of your mouth language in some senses is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel on a postage St.

And when you think about it like this, it does all sound a little bit limiting, right? But is the fact that we are living, breathing compression machines a good thing?

just as Some of the best songs have been written with just three chords, is this constraint a source of our creativity,

this compression algorithm that's constantly running in our head. Leads to all sorts of shortcuts and metaphors, stories, and inside jokes. Our grunts have turned into pretentious poems and entire . have been built around concepts that can be stuffed into a single word like money or God.

, Despite that relative magic, we also find ourselves regularly frustrated and misunderstood with many arguments springing up around the tragedy of confused intentions and exasperated claims of, well, that wasn't what I meant. Why don't you understand me?

So, for the time being, I think we can say that communication is hardly perfect.

And a last thought to think about is that different languages compress in very different ways to suit their needs. Some tribes have all sorts of words for specific smells , that most of us in the modern world can bay distinguish.

russian itself has two distinct words for colors that in English we both call blue, whilst other languages only have the words, black, white, and different shades of dark for the entire color spectrum.

By far, the weirdest example for me is a language that uses an entirely different number system for counting coconuts or counting fish.

Which is quite bananas and possibly another counting system for that.

But whilst we're talking about strange things, the favorite word that I discovered is, Mamihlapinatapai or something said a bit like that. And it roughly translates as a look that without words is shared by two people who both want to initiate something, but that neither wants to start,

it is a look that we have all felt and never known the word of before, so there you go.

Now the point of why I've told you that is that although language is just a very small funnel, that our thoughts must squeeze through one word at a time. Each word that goes through that funnel is a bit like the expandable trunk in Harry Potter that you can stuff all sorts of extra things into. And now that I've planted all of these thoughts into your brain, using merely words alone,

I think we are ready to tackle the first act of the story as we learn where on earth language came from and of course the great epic in mother nature of lonely individuals attempting to be understood by others.

ACT 1 - Cognitive Basis of LanguageBiological history of languages

Languages have existed for almost as long as life

signaling molecules between individual cells first began as they start to learn lessons from each other's, waste products and evolved ways to encode messages within them.

These days, fungi and trees have all kinds of chitter chatter going on between them in their own networks. But let's focus on multi-cellular animal life.

Jellyfish were the first to evolve an internal communication system that was basically a nerve net. There was no brain or central organizer, and essentially. Any nerve could shout that it had hit a rock or a shrimp, and each nerve that it was connected to would echo the same shout reverberating across the whole jellyfish a bit like a very fast Mexican wave.

And would result in a big flinch of the jellyfish. .

It might not sound that spectacular, but it is amazing. The next big upgrade, however, was with Flatworms, where we see the prototypes of the first brain, a few thousand neurons in the head that could command others, and this central coordination allowed more complex movements like W wring

or biting and eating. Well, this worked very well and the internal chatter grew and grew. When we get to amphibians and reptiles, their brains have some extra core functionality and it can do all sorts of magical messaging to coordinate breathing, balancing, taking in sight and basic planning, like finding a nice leaf to sit on the catch flies, or running away from a bird that you saw.

Of course, the next big leap you hopefully expect, which was in mammals and they have an extra layer of brain tissue or mush around the core basics of a reptile brain. This thin extra layer. The neocortex let them develop social behaviors like who's the boss, who gets to eat what and sleep with who.

Mammals also have a much greater obsession with their kids and a greater emotional range about anything in everything. I think

as we see the internal language of these creatures become more complex, they also developed many more ways of expressing themselves externally. Mice can use a range of high pitched squeaks to give M calls, warnings, or social interactions like honey, I'm home. They also spray pheromones in their urine like cats and dogs do. These Could mark territory, attract mates signal about some newly discovered food or living place.

I'm sure you'll know that a dog can whimper in fear or show disgust with a nose wrinkle. They can growl with aggression or head tilt in curiosity. In fact, dogs have eight different calls to say all sorts of different things.

Despite this, you still can't talk about the weather with your dog and it has no idea how you magically acquire food or how you are able to turn the sun on and off inside by switching the lights.

So this leads us to the next level up and the styles of language that we might be more intimately familiar with,

only made possible by a greatly expanded cortex region of the brain,, creating much finer motor control of movements and more advanced reasoning. And no, I'm not yet talking about humans, but apes.

They show an early echo of the basic forms of our own languages. They have an array of hand signals with over 60 different gestures for things like, I'm hungry, scratch me, piss off, Look over there. Now you might think, Hey, my dog can do all of that. But chimps have much more flexibility with these signals.

So a grabbing motion with the hand could mean three different things such as Climb on top of me or Stop that or go away. Chimps also have 12 different types of calls with grunts pants and whoops, that they can do.

And I know that sounds like only 50% more than the eight different calls of a dog, but.

A chimp can combine them, so they could do like a double hoot or a trigram, which would be a bark, a pant, and then a hoot, which might, mean a type of fruit has been found.

These are somewhere between the prototype of words and sayings and if humans stay with a chimp tribe, they can learn some of this basic language. And likewise, we've been able to teach apes to understand a few hundred of our own strange combinations of sounds that we call words.

And especially interesting thing about all of this is that the ape nonverbal gestures can be instantly understood by humans. Even human babies, in fact use a lot of the same hand signals before they'd learn to talk.

And if you think about when TV was first invented, it was entirely silent and everyone knew what was going on without learning any formal sign language. They just knew what the character was feeling and thinking and doing.

So we think at least a lot of nonverbal communication is perhaps innately baked into us.

The Interconnected Brain

And this finally leads us onto the question of more advanced forms of language.

these we think, began to sprout up around 1.6 million years ago when we start to see the first major changes in our fossil record

to try and understand the growing word complexity that humans developed. We have some things to learn about the reshaping of our brain and bodies that got us there.

Firstly, from a physical standpoint, the extra vocal membranes or reads that apes have allow them to do these loudest streaks.

That humans can't do because we lost those extra membranes, and basically speaking, our voice box hardware became more simple in many ways. Whilst upstairs in our brain, our software was becoming more complex.

As is probably becoming predictable to you by now, the Cortex region became larger and larger, as did its plasticity. The extra brain capacity that we had did not bake any language or culture into it. It was a blank slate that was just very adept at learning things and picking up the intricacies of whatever motor control or social lessons were needed to make the right sounds and gestures at the right time.

So of course we didn't simply jump into full complex language straight away, and that took another one and a half million years of slow advancements.

As they say, nature does not hurry. In his book, the Prehistory of the Mind, the archeologist Steven Han suggests our brain became increasingly like a Swiss army knife, a multi-tool with four major zones for learning different special types of intelligence. We had a zone for tool making.

Another one for understanding nature and surviving in it,

a zone for communication. And finally, one for social behaviors. Now, the issue with these specialized zones they were all very good at what they did, but they were kind of tacked on and they didn't have a way to communicate with each other, which is of course a fundamental limit on how useful they could be.

If you think about any skill, it's actually the fact that it interacts with others. Let's say you're really top notch at calculating numbers. Well, in isolation, that's a useless skill. You need to apply mathematics to farming or science or money, and then maths is a fabulously .

Useful skill to practice.

So what archeologists and psychologists think happened is that in this great cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago, these different brain units or zones started to become more interconnected and we developed a greater sense of cognitive fluidity.

Perhaps a surprising feature about this was our brains actually shrunk a little. And you would think that more connections would need more space, but it was more a unification that became much more efficient and developed more intricate ways of making these connections. For an analogy, if you think of a tangled mess of roads sprawling out like a web, then imagine a city grid that's tighter, well organized and it moves traffic faster.

Not because it's bigger, but because it's better connected.

And if this is correct, then this is how our brains became more powerful with greater imagination, where we could start to use language for many social behaviors and we could do things like adapt our tool skills for making tools for hunting or for wearing as a piece of fashion. And these are all things that we start seeing after this cognitive revolution as A great explosion of creativity seem to be unlocked by this final internal communication upgrade.

Before we do talk about all the cool different things that this explains. Let's explain all the cool different effects this had on talking.

Complex words and stuff

With this cognitive and physical leap complex speech with its very flexible nature finally became possible. Words can be created from a single sound or a combination of sounds stuffed together. And we have hundreds of available sounds to us in our voice boxes.

By combining these noises, we can make concrete words to describe things around us, like a rock or a book, et cetera. We can also use words to describe how those things around us interact. And with grammar, we can talk about how they all relate to each other.

A fascinating thing that we started doing with our increasing vocabulary is that a lot of these words that we created. Are very abstract words like freedom, love, need. They instantly spark meaning within you. Yet in nature they don't exist. There is no physical manifestation of them.

You can't see, hear, touch, smell, or taste. Democracy. Much the same could be said for faith or truth. You know what they are, but they don't actually exist in nature. The interesting thing about this is that it shows our imagination to go beyond describing merely the physical world around us.

You know, the wolf in the trees, et cetera. And instead, we could start making up all sorts of extra associations

For example, a stone is no longer a stone or a sharp stone, but it can be a beautiful stone or a special stone. And this flexibility allowed us to name all sorts of things and add all sorts of concepts into our brain. And I know this might sound obvious, but naming a thing or an idea and adding associations to it is really, really powerful.

Remember what I said earlier about each word is a bit like a magical trunk in Harry Potter with extra storage in it. Well take my name, Sam. When you think of me, you think more than just the word Sam, right? You, hopefully think of someone who teaches you fascinating stuff about history, technology, lexicon, and chimpanzees.

Maybe I fill you with hope and wonder about our past and future. Perhaps I just send you to sleep in five minutes. Who knows? That's a perfectly good reason to listen to a podcast. Now, some other things that you will know just by hearing my voice is that I am British and that I am male.

Now, those words, British male, they are two expandable word trunks full of their own baggage to do with them. Yet these two bags, effortlessly fit right inside the word Sam, along with any other baggage you might associate with me. So a single word can stuff all sorts of concepts into it for easy reference.

And that's important. If you go into any profession or scientific discipline, they talk in a complete lexicon that allows them to explain complex stuff with efficiency and they need to wield large concepts around in their heads without explaining everything in full detail. Imagine, let's say if every time I introduce myself as Sam, I had to explain the meaning of man and British, like we would never get anywhere at all.

So I just think it's amazing how much work a single word can do for us and the crazy stuff that's going on in our brains as we build concepts together.

And besides words, we also develop funny sayings. Like in Portuguese, they have a saying called Cher Chorizo, which literally translates to stuffing sausages, but in a figurative sense.

So as in to fill space or time with useless or irrelevant information. And the reason I chose that one is because I found all sorts of different crazy sayings that I would love to have time to tell you. But if I did, I would just be stuffing sausages myself and we need to move on.

Words and teamwork

As Yuval Noah Harra reminds us. The great thing about all these colorful words and sayings compared to our ape ancestors is the ability for teamwork and planning. An ape is certainly able to shout a cool that could signify a lion and all of his friends will race up into the trees.

Or they could yell a call that stands for an eagle. And equally, all the members will hide in the bushes.

But they can't do much more than that. With our flexible language, we can say something much more nuanced. Like, I saw a lion this morning earlier by the bend in the river stalking buffalo.

And from that we can clearly see that we go beyond just explaining what we've seen. We also start to be able to coordinate what to do about it.

? Right. So now that we have learned why and how humans develop this miraculous ability to compress thoughts into words, we can finally get into the next act. And the fascinating topic of what we started doing with all of these words.

ACT 2 - GOSSIP, MYTHS & RELIGIONGossip and the glue of society

I will begin by asking you, what do you think of when I say the word gossip? Maybe high school rumors, perhaps office politics or trashy celebrity magazines. Well, we might want to rethink that entirely for context here. Let's look at chimps again. In their society, they spend hours grooming each other to build trust. You know, picking fleas, tugging fur, bonding one on one. It's slow physical work, and if you want to be popular, you need a lot of stamina and time.

The upshot means that a chimp can only maintain 20 or 30 close friends before running outta grooming hours and probably patients. And so social circles are tiny because trust is just always face to face. Humans, however, are the only animals that can talk about things and people that aren't even there.

We can share secrets, swap jokes, and even sabotage rivals, all with nothing but a waggle of our gossipy tong.

This meant for the first time in history, your reputation could run miles ahead of you managing relationships without even meeting the person means that We could hold together bands of a hundred or 150 people. And eventually in the future, we learn to settle down into towns

and is all relied on gossip as the key to keep everyone more or less in line.

And if you want to think in practical history terms, let's say you're the guy that can't hit a mammoth with a spear from three feet away. Well, gossip means the whole tribe knows about this problem. But if you are also the person who shares sweet berries with people and plays caveman, peekaboo with the kids, you know, that gets around too.

So everyone was tracking who was trustworthy and who was a bit of a slacker.

Even today, studies show that around two thirds of all human conversation involves talking about others. This could be absent, relatives, rivals, friends, and of course strangers.

Now this obsession with caring about her reputation certainly seems to explain some of why we have social media addictions and of course, adds to the rollercoaster of emotions that teenagers experience.

But reputation is also why we do kind things for strangers and why most of us haven't set the village on fire for fun.

Instead of grooming fur, we can groom entire reputations at scale remotely and of course with less risk of fleas. And what's more, this system self reinforces itself. The more people care about their reputation, the better they behave, the stronger the gossip network grows. And, and that of course helps to keep Belize in free ledgers at bay.

This dense web of reputational information

creates a kind of collective intelligence within a group. A bit like you see with ants and bees that communicate through intricate signals to work as one human gossip forms this social glue that lets us scale trust to build communities that can think and act together

so if you think about it, long before legal systems gossip was there already keeping people in check and long before democracies it was, helping us make group decisions.

So next time you feel the urge to roll your eyes at some office gossip or your auntie's WhatsApp messages. Remember, gossip is more than just idle chatter. It was the first wireless network, if you will, that was bouncing reputations across the tribe.

And it was a giant step towards civilization as we know it. So now that we've seen how language revolutionized teamwork, let's add the next piece of the puzzle.

Myths and shared delusionsMealtimes

As we were busy mastering gossip, we also stumbled into an even stranger talent completely making stuff up, like entire worlds that existed only in our heads.

Up till then, as I've mentioned, words were mostly for trading facts. The rhino is over there. Don't put your hand in the fire. Useful things to communicate, but not as world changing as what we're about to talk about now with this cognitive leap. In all our abstract words,

we were learning that we could do more than describe reality, and we could in fact invent realities.

So let us travel into a early cave.

Hi, I'm in a cave. Well, actually, this isn't just any cave. This cave is where we talk to the mighty bison. God. He says that we must offer him extra stakes, which I will selflessly send to him by eating them myself. He promises in return, good luck, great weather, and fabulous hair.

Yes, that might sound ridiculous now, but back then, as Yuval Noah Harra points out, this was the cutting edge killer feature of the human mind

creating myths. And what does that actually mean was going on? Well, these myths could be embodied into totems, clan symbols, units of trade, and that allowed us to compete, love, trade with hundreds, thousands, and eventually billions of strangers. A lion was no longer just a lion.

It could be a trick to spirit or a clan Mascot. Shells weren't just pretty things they could stand for alliances, numbers, and even the world's first IOU notes

, anthropologists see this fiction explosion everywhere in the archeological record cave paintings of animals that had never been seen. Oka beads traded over vast distances.

Instruments like flutes and drums started appearing to play melodies that no one really needed for hunting. Exactly. These artifacts clearly display a mind that has taken the raw clay of sensor experience and spun it into culture, meaning, and of course, sometimes mischief.

What's more, these fictions could mean power. If you can convince your neighbors that a river God wanted you to lead the hunt, or that your shell necklace meant that. You always paid back your loans. Suddenly you had some leverage that had nothing to do with your muscles.

These invisible stories let us coordinate, organize, rule, and rebel, all for things that you could never see or touch.

This is very fundamental to civilization today. Let's say if your bank account has a lot of numbers in it, you can sew in helicopters, in champagne at will. You can even buy a ticket to take you to space. But if you're stranded on a desert island, those numbers are literally just some numbers.

They don't really mean anything without some other people agreeing that they mean something on that island by yourself. They are worth less than a soggy coconut.

And it is exactly the same for other things such as our laws, presidents and countries. They only mean something because they mean something to other people.

This is all around us A lawyer can file the right words in the right places, and suddenly your imaginary idea is now a legal recognized company.

A passport clerk can stamp a piece of paper and suddenly you are a citizen of a country Like in some senses when you really step back it, it seems like madness. But But it's the most genius thing ever. Of course, these magical spells only work on humans. If you try telling a chimpanzee that a squiggly line somewhere on a map is where one country ends and another begins. . He will think that you are probably one banana short of a bunch. If you were to promise him infinite bananas in monkey heaven in return for giving you his banana today, well, he will stuff that banana into his face faster than you can say.

monkey heaven exists.

So as Yuval Noah Harari reminds us this belief in collective hallucination is humanity's weirdest and most radical move. We are the only animal that will fight, build, or even die, not just for flesh and blood, family or personal territory, but for invisible ideas, nations, gods even favorite football teams.

So remember for a second that jellyfish with its first nerve net, with that invention, it was suddenly able to move its whole jiggly body in sync. Well, stories are our version of that. They let hundreds, even thousands of us move in mental sync, money, marriage, nations, even science, they're all just songs that we sing together.

And the more people that join the song, the more real it becomes comes. So this fiction explosion really wasn't just an extra party trick, it was civilization's secret source.

That first helped us build bigger tribes and went on to build things like pyramids and parliament.

So quite literally out of words, we could make entire worlds.

Early Religions - Animism, art and penises

Now this leads us to an interesting question that I think is worth asking about the early religions and how they may have worked.

History leaves us some clues listed about Mammoth ivory statues, a Lion Man carved 32,000 years ago, and burials of children covered with hundreds of fox teeth, which certainly shows that the past is full of stories that we don't really understand. Then there's the cave paintings where wolves are filled with pictures of animals, symbols, and often quite reliably an enthusiastic parade of penises. Now most scenes are a little cryptic, in the Lascaux cave. ?There's a famous painting of a bison

seeming to knock over a stick man who has a rather optimistic erection what does it mean exactly? We're not a hundred percent sure, but these doodles clearly mattered and are more than just artistic urges.

Archeologists think that our Stone Age ancestors saw the world as alive with spirits. A concept called animism.

It's not a religion that's about animals. It's more that anything can be animated. So the idea is that maybe the forest has a spirit or the river bank

as well, of course, as, a bison or a mammoth. So let's say you were to get sick, you might call a shaman to negotiate with whichever spirit had invaded your body, or if you had bad luck gathering food well, maybe the fruit tree spirits needed a more beautiful song to be sung to them.

Now this world would've been incredibly wild and varied. it's almost impossible for us to reconstruct it or understand it So today we see that most religions are based on theism, and that's the worship of a more universe, bending God or gods from the sky.

But for every gentle Buddhist or Rastafarian, smoking in peace, there's also a Viking wall order on a rampage and Aztec priest beheading entire towns or puritans burning witches in the village square.

So considering how completely different our forms of religion can be today, whilst all fitting under the description of theism, the amount of differences in animism must have been similarly unfathomable

Ancient tribes spoke thousands and thousands of different languages, and between the boulders and the brooks,. If it sparkled, loomed, or looked a bit like a bear, someone probably assigned it a spirit and possibly drew a penis on it just, you know, cover some of the cosmic bases.

And this might be a weird outcome of this, but whilst researching the Paleolithic Arc history,

I did find oddly calming that for as long as our imagination has been around, we have found Fowler Space art. Beautiful. Religious, or just a bit funny.

whenever you see a cock and balls rudely sprayed on a train or carved into a toilet door, instead of feeling so annoyed

at the banality of the youth of today. Well, you can remember they are practicing a tradition of humanity. Older than the concept of farming, older than the wheel and older even than any religion you've ever heard of.

and on that bombshell, we are ready to launch into the next act and our great self domestication.

ACT 3 - SELF-DOMESTICATION

Shame and Blushing

revisit the question of how a group of human beings can calmly sit on an airplane without slinging feces at each other. This miracle of civility is the product of one of humanity's greatest upgrades. As we've learned, language is more than just words. You certainly know the difference between someone laughing with you or laughing at you. And this leads us to the curious case of blushing and shame. We all know that if you are hot, your face flushes red to lose heat, and that's very sensible, right? But blushing because you just dropped your lunch tray in front of your boss. That, as Charles Darwin noted, is one of evolution's oddest quirks. Humans are the only animals who turn bright red in embarrassment, which doubles the attention on ourselves precisely when we want the ground to swallow as whole.

In fact, studies show that most humans can be more terrified of humiliation than real physical pain. And that makes you wonder, right? Wouldn't it be better evolutionary speaking to perhaps not turn into a pathetic red mess, to confidently stand tall, carry on, look like you know what you're doing.

, Apparently not. No. That is not an evolutionary good thing to do,

. So there must be a reason.

If we look at chimps again, we have one third of the strength of a chimp and we don't just beat people up when they catch us out. So evolution. Wasn't rewarding the strongest or the most stubborn of us.

In fact, it picked the people who could smooth things over and keep the peace.

You might say that evolution preferred us to be slight pushovers.

That might sound odd, but have you ever had a good idea that everyone disliked and found yourself feeling perhaps a bit embarrassed for your suggestion and subsequently agreeing with the group? Well imagine if every time we didn't agree with everyone and we just abandoned them and walk off like we would never be able to keep a job.

So getting on with people is actually pretty important and it goes much further than that. Imagine in the stone age, right? You come over all hungry and you perhaps steal some of the tribe's precious meat. Just as you are finishing it off, you are spotted and suddenly the whole tube is on you and the spirits are against you as well.

Now if you shrug and say, well, you know the meat was really great, you are all a bunch of losers. 'cause I finished it well. If you don't get killed on the spot, you are at least going to be kicked outta the tribe where you will of course eventually die. However, if you turned beat Street red, apologize profusely and practically wilted with your shame, you are signaling loud and clear that you're not a threat and asking for mercy to not be kicked out. And the magic about this is that you can't fake a blush.

Your body is there betraying you, proving to the tribe and the people around you. That you are genuinely, sorry.

Furthermore, the sensation of blushing is like an internal fire alarm within your brain that he's screaming loud and clear, like, don't do this stupid thing. Again, you banana head. And it genuinely teaches you.

So today, if you forget someone's name or you accidentally wave at the wrong person in public, you feel this overwhelming sense of shame because you just are wired to not want to offend people or look silly.

but if you do do something that's generally out of line, at least this public display of shame creates a little empathy in others for how you might actually be feeling.

And this really is important.

I went to a strict Catholic school and before we were allowed to eat our lunch, we'd all pray in unison and hold five seconds of solemn silence before we could tuck in.

One day, for some strange reason, unknown to me, my 8-year-old body suddenly decided to let out the loudest burp in like recorded history that just echoed around the entire hall, like God's own trombone. It was, I don't know how I've, I swear I've never done a burp this loud in my life. Anyway, total accident.

All the kids like lost it. Thought it was hilarious. But until, of course the teachers screaming, like took over and I was dragged outta this dining hall by my neck straight to the headmaster and the school priest. Yes, the school had a priest.

So after a few minutes of them raging at me for abusing the sanctity of God and never in the history of the school had a child show in such disgusting behavior and that the only option could be expulsion. Well, in front of them was a child who was clearly horrified, who was just a soggy mess of shame, showing possible signs of mild trauma at that point, and my clear, uncontrollable grief, shame,

and sorrow about the entire affair. Was able to calm the desire of my teacher's need to channel the wrath of God against me, and they slowly morphed their toe into a much more reasonable conclusion, which was Don't do it again, you silly child. And that was fine. So just as shame, save me then. It is certainly not unreasonable to consider that. It probably saved countless lives in history.

The Execution HypothesisMealtimes

Now here is where the story does darken a little bit.

It is hard to imagine being part of a group where the ultimate punishment wasn't just a stern word or a fine, the punishment was, waking up to find the whole camp quietly agreed that you had to die.

A reality that Richard Ranum proposes with his execution hypothesis.

He thinks that blushing to get an apology wasn't the only thing affecting our evolution, but a darker side was also at play that of eugenics, where we selectively breed out traits we dislike. Now we do this all the time with plants and animals. So he asks . if we did this for ourselves.

Capital punishment certainly appears in almost every hunter gatherer society we've found , and not in the formal style of course that we see today. Execution was mostly in the style of the murder of Julius Caesar. Group members would conspire behind the gaze of a domineering alpha male and kill him in his sleep or stab him in the back.

Anthropologist. Christopher Boem describes in one of his books an example of a bully in the Ymo tribe, he began taking more than his share, beating people, intimidating others when he had the chance. And one day as he climbed a tree for honey, leaving his weapons below on the ground.

The others just quietly hid them and when he came down, they beat him to death. There was no ceremony, no speeches, just some decisive group. Justice

now was our domestication entirely through. The course of executing the least desirable traits,

while other theories of course could be at play,

Such as female mate choice or intergroup competition, but it's clear that , less aggressive humans were the ones that got to pass on their genes,

this has a big effect on how people turn out. , And we can look at studies of the domestication experiments in Russian foxes. Over a few generations of carefully breeding the calmest foxes, they turned a snarling bite, happy wild animal into a floppy eared puppy like companion.

And we genuinely think somehow this happened to us where we bred ourselves for sociability. We have softer faces. Males are more female, like with their slender faces than what we used to look like. And parts of our brain involved in fear and aggression shrunk

In fact. There's a crazy study on the aggression levels of ice hockey players. It's really fascinating where they looked at the face with the height ratio they found that the wider your face was, the more fights that you got in.

And the nice thing about this study is that everyone wears a helmet so you can't even see someone's face at the time 'cause so potentially reduces some bias in the findings. Now, of course. We don't want to stereotype every person with a wide face as just violent, but as we see in the fossil records there was a big reduction in the width of our face and forehead, which seems to ring true with our studies, that it made us less fighty.

So besides the physical evolution here, if the execution hypothesis is correct, it's also a social evolution that further distance us from apes we ended up creating what's called a reverse dominance hierarchy, where many people can band together to prevent one individual from dominating.

So unlike apes, bullies don't rule the group. The group rules the bullies, and this was by consensus about who posed a threat, and it was discussed, debated, and sometimes even gossiped in the dark.

What's cool about this is it literally lays the foundations that evolve into trial by jury and democratic values. Long before any formal politics or written codes, justice began as a team, sport and democracy, a shared risk amongst individuals.

But this, the slight quirk that this presents us with is a fundamental paradox in the human psyche, our highest values. Justice, fairness, cooperation. They seem to have grown out of cold, deliberate, collective killing. So the road to compassion seems to be paved with literally violence.

And we might ask, well, what about today? You might think that we're beyond execution at least, which is mostly outlawed. Sure. A few hundred years ago, we can picture a wooden platform in a crowded square where people jostle through a view, not because they're necessarily cool by nature, but because public punishment was promising closure combined with a strange fascination that people have for watching others die.

Even this century, millions of people watched the leaked video of Saddam Hussein being hung.

But perhaps a much more common echo of our ancient patterns is cancel culture. Social media mobs can still gather to execute reputations driven by the same reverse dominance instincts that were once used to eliminate village bullies.

The intention behind it is, of course, to protect the vulnerable from bad actors and call them out in society, but crowds can sometimes lose a sense of nuance and mere opinions seem to be enough to validate some very aggressive action.

So as we see our quest for justice, both old and new, certainly has two sides to the coin. And this now leads us straight into the related topic of types of violence.

MealtimesReactive vs Proactive Violence

So again, I'll start with a question. Have you ever wondered why most bar fights fizzle out yet? History is packed with cold calculated massacres. Well, it turns out that not all violence is born equal.

Psychologists split violence into two types. There's reactive aggression.

Hot-blooded, spur of the moment, lashing out. And then there's proactive aggression. That's violence, which is planned, deliberate, and strategic. A chess move rather than a fist slam.

Now, despite the headlines, humans actually have a lot less of the hot blooded rage than most mammals. But on the cold-blooded strategic side, we are the Olympic champions of it. Other primates will lose their temper all the time, but humans, we plot from mob hits and jewels to Nazi death camps and Aztecs with their daily conveyor belt of human sacrifices.

So you might think, let's say that the example of a male lion who, if he wins the dominance of a pride will kill all the infants around. You might think that's proactive aggression, but it's, it's quite instinctual and animalistic and as a response to his environment rather than overtly planned.

Like he certainly won't organize his whole group to go out and kill all the babies of every other pride around just to further grow his dominance.

However,

Despite claiming that humans are the only ones with proactive violence, we have found that chimpanzees who are our cousins and the closest to humans, they do show an early prototype of this calculated violence in the wild.

Several different studies have found Groups collecting together to hunt single males from other chimp tribes.

Now normally when a group of chimps get close to another group, they shout a lot and cause a scene.

But when they're in hunting mode, they are extremely silent. And they creep through the forest. When they do find a single chimp victim alone, they will pounce on him quickly.

And you'd think considering how strong chimps are that they might put up a fight, but with eight chimps versus one, that means an individual chimp can each grab one of the victim's limbs, to hold them in place.

That leaves everyone else free to essentially tear the chimp to pieces

and scientists have watched them rip out their victim's guts, tear off their testicles. And sometimes they leave this poor Tim to die. Other times they keep going until he is clearly very dead and even eat him.

One of the scariest parts about this though is that they only do this in coordinated groups where there's so much safety in numbers that the attackers barely suffer or scratch. In fact, in every recorded killing, there wasn't a single major injury against the attackers.

Now this does sound kind of terrifying, but it still never gets out of hand to the scale of humans, where we have gone many steps further in terms of the size of the amount of cold blooded killing, we can do, we have many genocides to talk about like Rwanda. Cambodia. Recently, back in the day, there was a course of Vladi Impala , where he lined literally miles of roadsides with dead victims.

That he had impaled on stakes whilst they were alive. In fact, his legend grew so much that he's now better known as Count Dracula.

Now, as we have been talking about cooperation and myths, this aspect of our violence is a strange emergence that we see when people can become so hypnotized by something they believe in or a righteous feeling of superiority, that they feel completely okay with doing this.

So where we see animals react in humans plan we are also seeing perhaps a side effect of our missing ideologies that allowed us to go beyond just building armies and start building ideologies and things like death camps, but some good news that this finally leads us to a more positive side of human nature in our oddities, and that is of course sharing.

Mealtimes Sharing and small town thinking

as they say, kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

And as we learned in the last episode, that fire changed how we cooked our food or language changed how we shared it.

If you imagine, say dusk on an ancient plane, smoke is hanging over the camp. Kiba, comes back from his hunting, empty handed. Meanwhile, niru older and more careful. drags back a small antelope. He says nothing, and he lays his beer down and steps back. As everyone knows, the meat is not his to cut or share out.

Instead, tahi the elder, kneels next to it with a stone blade and he smiles and says, this is a scrawny little thing. I've seen bigger rabbits. Now everyone can see it's a good kill, but people laugh a little not to wound neuro, but to smooth the edges.

And to limit the self-congratulatory nature of his success when the meters shared out, the best part goes to grandmother who can't even hunt anymore. Children are getting the crackling and niru who caught the animal, gets his chair last. Later by the fire, someone starts a story about the river spirit who hates proud men and hides the fish from them. Children listen wide-eyed learning their culture now what we've heard is a story of not just gossip and myth. It is a story of governance all in one scene.

Less about rules and more these little rituals that kept the tribe focus on collaboration and sharing with each other, and putting aside our competitive egos,

which I think is a really nice picture to remind ourselves of what was happening most of the time.

Now, of course there's a, a slight negative side to this. , If we think of this as our history, well the same instinct to cut people back , and limit their egos. We can see this in small towns today, where the moment someone is seen as too big for their boots, there are whispers and grumbles around. You know,

we call it small town mindset, and it's an ancient reflex when no one could actually rise too far above the small pond they all lived in. Of course, now we live in different times and the goal of society I think is for us to achieve both abundance and sharing.

But there is. A bit of a twist when it comes to our psychology. Abundance can be just as dangerous as scarcity. In one experiment, again, on chimpanzees, researchers gave a troop more bananas than they could possibly eat

Instead of this resulting in like a bonobo style utopia, which you would hope for, where they all share and live freely because they have enough to go round, no. Sadly. Instead it was chaos dominant. Males were monopolizing the fruit. They beat up anyone who tried to take some, and the whole cooperation system of the tribe collapsed.

The experiment was going so badly that it had to be abandoned. Now this does make you wonder, after hundreds of thousands of years where we lived in small tribes, where there was a need for equality and sharing, have we really adapted to this abundance of the last few centuries?

This question certainly isn't for just biologists, uh, it's for philosophers as well,

. Could our modern billionaires be the human version of the banana hoarder, money, like fruit can buy status mates and influence, but beyond a certain point, the extra pile does have diminishing returns.

' just like a chimp, can't eat 10,000 bananas. And it's an interesting question I'm not here to say billionaires are terrible or billionaires are great. I'm just asking a question. As we have already learned, nature does thrive on inequality. It is a prerequisite to drive competition and innovation, but too much of it. And as we've often seen, the social fabric can tear.

This is why all societies ancient and modern have rules for sharing systems for collaboration and ways to stop abundance from turning into tyranny.

So as we round up what we have learned here in our cognitive revolution, I'm going to remind you how much we do have to be positive about, yes, , we can be the nastiest of species, but we can also be the nicest.

In our news cycle, it might be a permanent display of all of the bad parts, but by and large, 99.99999% of what goes on every day is perfectly non alarming cooperation, besides the simple act of getting on a plane and getting on with each other, we manage things like heart surgery space, travel, stock markets. These all rely on our shared imaginations and our exceptional ability to work together, which is actually pretty incredible if you really consider how impossibly hard it has been for.

For Nature to create any form of society, of organism that can self-organize the human machine of today is really nothing short of a miracle.

Yes, we might have a dark side, but as Richard Rangan reminds us. There is something that we all take for granted from the hunter-gatherers to the pope. We all live with a moral compass and we do have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. That, for the most part, genuinely does speak to the better angels of our nature.

The very fact that we've collectively made up ideas such as human rights and that we work to uphold them, shows that we have transcended many parts of our animalistic nature.

Now in this show we'll have plenty more to learn about democracy, justice, and human rights

In, the coming episodes and years. But for the next act of this episode, at least I want to move on from the time period of our cognitive revolution and briefly cover just the evolutions of language up to today and where communication could be going next.

ACT 4 - EVOLUTIONS OF LANGUAGELanguage shifts

Now what connects an ancient hunter naming the direction of the wind with Shakespeare, tossing new words into the English Jew, and you doom scrolling through memes whilst you put off your bedtime. Well, they are all parts of the flow of language.

Once upon a time, every clan or band was spinning up its own dialect. Tens of thousands of little islands of language across the world.

Migrations would split tongues into Mortons. Each were tuned to the smells, soils, social drama of its speakers.

You may have heard the example that for the Inuit snow isn't just snow, it can be thick ice or packed snow, qury drift or sticky stuff for a proper igloo. And each of these have a different name. Whereas in parts of Africa, water that falls from the sky, whether it's frozen or not, is really just all called the word weather.

In fact, even how we say something like it's not for me is flavored by the place in Britain and the us. We say, it's not my cup of tea in Brazil. They have a saying that translates as it's not my beach and in Spain, their saying is It's not my saint, .

However, despite all this diverse languages that we have, history isn't kind to the colorful differences? When people move or trade or conquer, languages collide sometimes mixing more often we see the smaller language ground out of existence,

colonization, bringing with it diseases and guns. Does more than just erase whole cultures. It shrinks the world's vocabularies faster than burning dictionaries. Furthermore, today, 96% of the world's population speaks just 4% of the current 7,000 languages that are left, still spoken. Many of these languages have less than 2000 speakers still active.

And anthropologists genuinely expect that 90% of the existing languages will die out this century. and when that happens, we are not just losing words, we are losing ways of slicing reality. Remember those tribes that had several different ways of naming smells

that we don't even notice in the west?

As more people want to talk to more people in the same languages, we are making sacrifices.

Most of the large languages that are spoken today

are a melting pot of different languages that came before them, but they have also lost a lot of the nuances of the different cultures that were there before.

And another really nice thought here is they say that to speak a second language is to possess a second soul.

And there is something a little sad about the different ways of seeing the world that we are losing. At any rate, though. I feel I've had enough negativity for this episode, and we can talk about positive stuff from now on. Languages do more than just drift and die. They are also full of joyous innovation.

Shakespeare. Over 1,700 words. Many of them are very useful, such as the word addiction manager, even the word eyeball, which makes you wonder what people called an eyeball before that like, I don't know, the minor boggles. Anyway, he also coined plenty of classic phrases such as Break the ice, heart of gold, and of course, star cross lovers.

But if talking about poets sounds like much to do about nothing.

Well, every generation shapes its slang and summons some new expressions from thin air. Today the Oxford Dictionary gets 800 to 1000 new words a year each entry, a little snapshot of the age.

So if you're wondering what some new words in 2025 were, we have. Climb Aval to represent someone who eats a diet based on its impact to the environment. Mouse Jiggler, which is a device to jiggle your computer mouse so you can pretend that you are working. And the term wry, which is a derogatory way to describe the promotion of progressive or liberal ideas.

So I think it's good to remember that languages are very much still alive, I would need another whole season to fit in the history , of all our words. And there was actually a really good podcast called The History of English, if you really are into that.

But now I want to use my words to explore

Shame and Society

how words have continued to shape culture with our evolving role of gossip and shame.

Every culture basically runs on two engines. Aspiration who we hope to be and shame, who we dread becoming. They are two sides of the same coin. so society's moral GPS, and they steadily recalibrate. What is cool and what is really uncool.

Of course, the boundaries of shame move with every generation. Once upon a time, the 10 Commandments were a new idea that threatened hellfire for moral failings for a period in Japan, samurai would choose death over dishonor. And it wasn't long ago that it was shameful to be homosexual. Whereas now shame really targets intolerance itself.

The trouble that we find ourselves in is that our map of shame now redraws itself faster than ever. We even stumble over outdated language. For example, I still catch myself calling groups of people.

Guys,

the thing with these culture shifts is they can leave us feeling lost or suddenly on the wrong side of public outrage. Social media especially is really supercharging this effect. Once played out in a village, now happens before millions of people. And in our effort to right old wrongs, we can overshoot and start weaponizing shame it anyone in its path.

As our moral compass violently swings about. One result of this new age is that politicians who seem impervious to shame, like Donald Trump for example, they can really thrive ' cause when outrage is constant for some people, shame can lose its power altogether.

Another sign of our old and new shame systems. Clashing is our increasing moral confusions today. For example, we want to remove shame from struggles like addiction or obesity. Whilst we grow our ability for empathy.

However, if we remove it entirely, do we lose sight of genuine aspirations like health or discipline? And it's a tightrope, too much shame and we crush people, but too little. And we risk losing our standards altogether.

And ultimately we have to realize that. Trying to remove shame completely from society is like trying to get rid of our own shadow and instead we have to learn how to redirect it positively. Let's say, for example, that you disagree with me right now, you could be feeling an urge to call me out and leave a bad comment.

Well, right then you would be using shame to try and spread your opinions on our culture. So we see that essentially you can't have moral values without shame. And we can be certain that in a hundred years, commonly accepted practices of today will seem completely barbaric. And that is definitely a good thing. So we don't need to think so much about whether shame will guide our future. What we need to wrestle with as world changes is, how wisely we can learn to use it with our changing communication landscape.

And this leads us into a quick review of how communication has changed that we'll be finally ready to explore what the future of language and communication might look like.

Evolution of communication

before books, all stories lived on the lips of people gathered around the fire, then we had written words at

let us bottle up rules revelations and revenge debts in hard copy.

Later will see the invention of the printing press, which created a revolution of literacy it helped fuel the scientific revolution, , which then usher in new technologies such as newspapers that we all got addicted to, . and soon we had radio and TV and we really invited the world into our living rooms.

And now we have the internet, smartphones, and social media so that we can communicate with anyone and everyone at the speed of light. And here's a nice fact to put this in perspective.

When Caesar was stabbed in the back in 44 bc, it took two whole months for the news to reach Britain from Rome Napoleon died in 1821, almost 2000 years later. How long did the news take to reach the uk again, it took two whole months.

Yet now only 200 years later, the news of any scandal coup or viral cat video is literally a push notification away. So it is hardly strange that the modern world can feel overwhelming. A politician if he wants to, can declare a tariff war on an island of penguins.

Or, , he can make eating a bacon sandwich look harder than quantum physics. And regardless, as the public, we follow every second of it.

And it's interesting as innovators to ask, with all this type of connectivity, how our language and our brains are being rewired it does seem like how we speak, what we value, who we hear from first is really all for grabs. And that gets us to the big question of if language shaped our past. Where is it leading us next?

Well, now that we're ready to talk about the future, I need to take us back to the very start of this podcast,

Remember when I spoke about the compression problem and how we transfer data from brain to brain?

Well, as I said, inside your head is swirling infinite ocean of thoughts, and when you want to share even a tiny drop of that with someone else, you press the noisy meat flaps inside your face together and you squirt out sound waves one word at a time.

our ancestors, setting up a mammoth hunt in per lithic times

Face, the same speech. Speed limits as an astrophysicist trying to explain orbital dynamics. Today,

But it's interesting when we look at innovation, otherwise, our phone data speeds, keep upgrading from two G to 3G to 4G and so on and so forth. And it will keep upgrading with technology. So where is the next communication upgrade for our brain?

Why can't we upload our thoughts as fast as we think them? Well, some entrepreneurs do believe the next revolution in communication. We'll be finally breaking these ancient speed barriers that we live with.

Instead, we could let our ideas travel as fully and as fast as they occur in our minds.

Magical Wizard Hats

Okay, now this is gonna get a bit weird, but imagine a hat that instead of making you a wizard, turns you into a mind reader. Or better yet, a mind sharer, no phone, no typing, just pure thought, zap seamlessly from brain to brain. Now this is something that Tim Urban has coined as the magical wizard hat, but he's talking about Neuralink from Elon Musk and other brain computer interfaces.

The idea is that we'd no longer need to mumble through meat flaps in our face or suffer chronic bandwidth bottlenecks of asking ourselves, how the hell do we even explain something that we're thinking about?

No, with the wizard hat for the brain, you simply just. Plop it on. Suddenly your thoughts fly faster than ever imagined unlocking telepathic level communication. ta. Now, of course, yes, it's more complicated than slipping on a hat neural linkage, pioneering surgical techniques to implant tiny electrodes in the brain, aiming to turn this whole sci-fi dream into reality.

But before I dive into the technical details, let's just think big picture for a second.

This thought hat, if it were to exist, might not simply upgrade how we chat. It could create a whole new level of connection.

Tim Urban suggests that breaking open the bandwidth bottleneck between our brains could see billions of minds and machine intelligences merging into a planet scale collective, super brain

idealistically speaking. Instead of one AI or one billionaire holding all the cards, we could all become a hive of , superhuman, tapping into a shared ocean of knowledge far greater than any one individual.

picture this, you can remember anything you've ever experienced and share what you like With others, you can learn skills like playing guitar in the blink of an eye, simply by downloading the mastery someone else has honed.

Perhaps thinking with AI could be as seamless as breathing, becoming. . part human, part machine, super intelligences. It's even possible that doors open up to brain uploads and digital immortality. You could live an incredibly vibrant existence, free from the bodies frailties.

Our consciousnesses could hop into virtual or robotic avatars, and you could go , wherever your imagination takes you.

Now, if we think about what we learned about the original language revolution that gave us the leap from wild apes to cooperative storytelling, humans. This next leap could be another Level 10 event on the Richter scale. It's hard to really imagine the effects like a truly collective human intelligence could rewrite what it means to think, create, and be a human.

Potential Limitations on Neuralink and Brain Computer Interfaces

So exciting times, of course. But before we dive headlong into the brain computer revolution, we can . Slow down. Talk about what's actually possible and what science still really needs to be figured out.

Well, , Firstly, there is the speed of human thought itself. We think at roughly a similar speed to the words that we speak, like if you imagine your inner monologue.

It's mostly in your native language and it's not 10 times faster than when you talk out loud. Sure,

possibly faster, but actually a psychologist who might argue there's more errors than you're aware of, you might feel like your thoughts are seamless and fully formed, but if you ever try to write your ideas down, you quickly discover. You don't know half as much as you think you do, and your thoughts are full of holes and errors that you hadn't noticed and you probably need to fix.

Then there's the concept of how we learn. We aren't sure if you could really add content to the brain faster than we learn naturally because it takes time for the brain to rewire our connections. So sure. Let's say you wired into the visual cortex. You could play it images of memories, or you could send.

Muscle twitch impulses to the motor cortex to make some movements happen. But your brain itself , doesn't necessarily learn the skill as much as just using the device , if you can connect to the right places.

And then there's the question of connecting to the right places on the physical side, the human brain has 86 billion neurons on average.

Now Neuro Lyn's newest device in 2025 , has barely a thousand. And when you start adding questions about scar tissue, electrode degradation, and just massive technical hurdles, we can see that there's still very, very early days and there are plenty of people out there who argue that the plan of a Neuralink is failed from the start due to just being too invasive.

Now, it doesn't mean it's completely game over. There are other groups that are working on less invasive options like the stent tro, which is a device that snakes up your blood vessels to reach the brain, which sounds worse, but actually doesn't even need surgery.

Other companies like meta, the creators of Facebook , and Kernel, they are using non-invasive brain scanning techniques like Meg, and just with brain scans, they've been able to decode your thoughts .

And clearly see which images or sentences you're trying to construct just by watching brain activity, which I find incredibly mind blowing that just by watching someone's brain, you can literally recreate pictures of the images they're looking at.

, And I'll put some resources to this in the show notes if you want to look at that research.

Anyway.. Now let's assume we do solve some of the fundamental technology problems. Then we get the bigger philosophical questions like, how do we keep this democratic? Or will only the rich have access first? And what does that mean to people who fall behind on their capabilities?

Then what about if governments or corporations could hack your mind and run their own software on you? That sounds pretty terrible.

And then there's another question around privacy and what happens with all your memories? Something that we've seen with smartphone adoption , is a side effect that is actually reduced crime because so many people basically have a CCT device on them.

But also young people's desires to go and get drunk has reduced 'cause. They're scared about what gets caught on camera and they don't want to be shamed. And there's a callback for the human issue around shame.

Well, now imagine if everything that you can see or think has a recorded memory. What does that really mean for surveillance? Or if you want to delete some of your memories , or if you just have some intrusive thoughts and would they get noticed and flagged by an allee state It is kind of scary. Another great thing about humans is our ability to change and grow. But what if you can't ever outlive your past in a world when no one forgets things? These certainly go beyond technical issues towards political, ethical, and in some cases, quite existential questions we can ask ourself.

Issues with predicting the future

Anyway. Will any of this science fiction, sounding fantasy stuff good, bad or weird come true? ,

Well, certainly not all of it, and probably none of it will happen exactly how we imagine it. However, I can guarantee you that some of it will happen you might ask, how can I do that?

Well, if you consider that the first mini computer was the size of a walk-in wardrobe, and that had a mere 16 bit processor , now a handheld device that can fit in your pocket is millions of times more powerful than

That computer, . So I think if we stop worrying for a second about the next year or two and try to think in terms of decades, then the laws of compounding will mean the present state of brain computer interfaces will look hilarious to our future selves.

Of a certain, we will be able to create some unimaginable improvements on how they work. And it's not unreasonable to assume, at least some of the ideas that I've just presented will in theory be possible. And some of them happen

. Now, sure, we might not meld into some giant mega super brain organism. Before you think that I'm claiming that something more reasonable will happen. It might actually be even crazier than that. There's a fantastic quote from Arthur C.

Clarke in 1964 where he says that if you try to make a prediction about the future that sounds at all reasonable in 50 or even 20 years, you'll almost certainly be wrong.

You'll find that your prediction was embarrassingly conservative. Yet if for some reason you actually saw the future and could describe it in precise detail as it was going to happen, well, your predictions would sound so absurd and farfetched that everyone would tell you that you are quite mad.

Back in the 1950s, people thought we'd have nuclear power vacuums within 10 years, whilst others were saying that TV would never catch on because we get bored of staring at a box.

Back in 2005, Bitcoin didn't exist. Donald Trump was starting the second season of The Apprentice and no banker had ever heard , of a mouse Jiggler. And look what happened after 20 years. So, although I can't tell you exactly what will happen in the future or how, let's just say it's likely , you or your children will at some point have some form of brain computer interface, or as we might hopefully call it a magical wizard hat.

Wrap Up

so there you have it from compression algorithms in cave paintings to telepathic wizard hats, the same creative constraints that gave us language might soon free us from it entirely.

It's certainly an interesting time to be alive.

. Now in terms of this episode, it did take me a hot while to put together as there wasn't really a single place that all these different ideas in one. But I am really glad it exists now, and I hope it taught you something.

This episode had a lot of different resources. Uh, I'll just name a few of them. ,

Richard Wrangham and Jane Goodall's work on ape societies and human cooperation. Summarized in his books, the Goodness Paradox and Demonic males

Nicholas Shae for his research on concepts.

Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens, and the chapter about the cognitive revolution and shared myths.

Stephen Mithen's research on the evolution of both the brain and of language in his books, the Prehistory of the Mind and the Language Puzzle. And I would say his book, the Language Puzzle is probably my top recommendation today for an absolute geek fest that is actually kind of readable.

Last book is Christopher Boehm's book on Moral origins. But of course I also have to mention Tim Urban's. Wait, but why Blog his installment all about neurolink, which was excellent If that didn't sound like enough, I dipped into various chapters of other books and several science papers and many interviews, a full reading list is available in the show notes.

when I get to the premium episode . For this episode, we'll certainly have a lot to discuss from my random other research.

From theory of mind teaching apes to talk, what the hell is paradol? And a bunch of crazy saying that I couldn't wangle in.

If this journey through human evolution sparked something in you, well, here's how you can help. You can leave a good rating. , You can share it with someone who you think would enjoy diving through these ideas.

And you can subscribe for the Ride ahead. I research, write, edit, and produce the entire show, including some of the questionable jokes. So, , yes, every rating genuinely helps the show reach more curious minds , and if you're wondering why the show looks so good, well, Francisco Kaha did the designs

Coming up in the next episode, we will be exploring systems thinking and how small changes create massive ripple effects. Then we'll be returning to history . For the pointed innovations that made us the aex predator of the world. That is needles, arrows, spears and boats. And yes, even boats are kind of pointy,

I really hope this episode made you see the world just a little differently and has at least done more than change how you look at fall space art

There is a saying that language exerts hidden power like the moon on the tides. And I hope you can see a little better the subtle influence of

language and gossip, shame and culture and, the multitude of concepts you can stuff into the magical expandable boxes that we call words.

And with that, remember what we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean.