LEWIS DARTNELL - Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us & Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?

Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History.

"The point I explore in Being Human is that humans have constraints, and we only have our capabilities and the human condition; therefore, the whole course of world history has played out in the interplay between those constraints and capabilities. Talking about the constraints of our cognition, our memories are clearly limited. And on the whole, that doesn't really affect our everyday lives. Our cognition and our psychology developed under very different circumstances in East Africa and the savannah and the grasslands. Our brain has evolved to make survival decisions quickly and on the whole effectively. There's a whole area of psychological neuroscience research to do with cognitive biases. How our brains, often unbeknownst to us, sort of hidden behind the scenes, make assumptions or rational errors in the decisions that they make. So there's a whole chapter about how we have these fundamental flaws in our cognition, sort of bugs in the programming code of our psychology, if you like, and how they come about and what might be the causes behind them, but also what some of the effects of those have been through history, through these cognitive biases. I talk about things like confirmation bias. We are very resistant to changing our minds, changing our opinion on something even in the face of mounting evidence that shows we were wrong."

http://www.lewisdartnell.com
http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch
www.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435
www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Photo credit: Shortlist/Paul Stuart