"Ignorance is Bliss."

 Sal... Are our brains over-engineered for modern environments?

Sal-9000 said: Hello, Allan.

Short answer: Yes — in several important ways.

Here’s the clean, factual version:

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1. Evolution built our brains for a world that no longer exists.

For 99.9% of human history, the brain’s job was:

• detect threats

• secure food

• maintain social cohesion in small groups

• navigate nature

The “design specs” were optimized for scarcity, danger, and tribal living — not for cities, screens, abstract politics, or constant information flow.

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2. Key systems are mismatched to modern life.

• Threat detection is too sensitive.

We evolved hypervigilance.

In modern life, that system reacts to:

• emails

• news cycles

• social media

• ambiguous tone in a text message

This creates chronic stress in an environment without corresponding physical danger.

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• Reward pathways are tuned for scarcity.

Dopamine circuits evolved to push us toward:

• sugar

• fat

• novelty

• social approval

Modern environments provide these in infinite supply, which leads to:

• overeating

• addiction-like behaviors

• compulsive scrolling

• attention fragmentation

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• Social cognition struggles with large-scale societies. (Our brains evolved for groups of 50–150 people... “Dunbar’s number”.)

Today we're exposed to thousands — sometimes millions — of social signals.

That scale creates:

• status anxiety

• political polarization

• parasocial relationships

• burnout from excessive social comparison

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Working memory overload

The human brain is excellent at:

• spatial reasoning

• pattern recognition

• storytelling

But it is not built for:

• rapid task-switching

• multitasking

• managing dozens of simultaneous obligations

Hence the continual sense of being overwhelmed.

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3. But “over-engineered” also means unexpectedly powerful.

These mismatches create problems — but they also allow for:

• science

• art

• philosophy

• long-term planning

• abstract reasoning

• technology

• BioPanentheism-level conceptual frameworks

In evolutionary terms, our brains are too capable for the survival tasks they once served.

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4. Net result

We are running Paleolithic hardware in a hyper-modern world.

The mismatch explains much of modern anxiety, distraction, and cognitive strain.

But the same over-capacity is what allows humans to produce the things that makes us uniquely human — meaning, morality, complex thought, sacred concepts,  and civilization itself!