• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1569 0

concept of mutual advantage that lies at the very heart of his vision: Forming the basis of all markets is the idea that goods, money, or work can be exchanged for other goods/money/work and that both parties can benefit from this exchange. This cannot occur without the presence of moral values because, in order to trade, both parties must have a sense that one cannot simply take from the other without giving something in return. A mammoth tusk, for example, might belong to Ook or to his tribe as a whole; Natto, the shaman from the tribe two hills over, may want the tusk. He can take it without Ook’s knowledge or permission, or he can exchange some of his (or his tribe’s) corn for the tusk. Thinking of something as mine/ours is a value-based admission, implying an awareness of rights; that is, if you have earned/created something, then other people are obliged to respect your ownership. Ownership engenders rights, obligations, and prohibitions. To create a market, both trading parties must be capable of this sort of values-based thinking and see the mutual benefit in exchange. The rise and success of market-based economies, therefore, might never have occurred without the biological success of collaborative, values-based thought.

BELIEVE IT

There is one last piece of the brain puzzle to touch on: belief. A belief occupies a very special place in the human intellect: It can exist in the absence of any objective proof, and often in the face of direct contradiction. We all have something of a system of beliefs. Religious doctrine, cultural myth, even narrative history often sustain and propagate stories and beliefs that have no basis in fact. Some people even depend on it. For instance, flat-earthers know from study that the earth is round, but believe it to be flat nonetheless. Many people teach their children to believe in Santa Claus although they have not ridden in his flying sleigh.

A big part of our humanness involves our ability to hold both factual knowledge and belief in our consciousness simultaneously. In the case of Santa Claus, some even ascribe benefit and power to our very ability to believe. The other side of this belief coin, however, is that belief can also negate fact. We can know a fact but refuse to believe in it, and to reconcile this conflict we decide that the contradicting knowledge is wrong. Some people believe in ghosts and spirits, and their dedication to that belief—right or wrong—leads them to discount a substantial body of evidence to the contrary. I’m not here to question or refute anyone’s particular beliefs, but it is important for our discussion to understand that believe and know have two different definitions and employ two different parts of our brains.

Belief can have a powerful, uncontrolled chemical effect on how we think and process information. The starkest illustration of this is called the placebo effect. In studies done at the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers told two groups of subjects that they were to receive an antidepressant drug; one group got the drug, and the other received a placebo instead. The placebo group experienced the same physiological response as the group getting the real drug.17 Though a drug and a placebo may both affect a specific brain region, the drug does so directly; placebo effects are typically activated by belief alone. The belief causes the brain to act as if it were fact. In another experiment at the University of Michigan, scientists injected the jaws of healthy young men with enough saltwater to cause painful pressure, while positron-emission tomography (PET) scans measured the impact in their brains. During one scan, the researchers told the men that they were also getting a pain reliever, although it was actually a placebo. Typically, pain relievers mimic the effects of endorphins or cause them to be released, thus blocking pain. In this case, because the subjects believed they were getting a pain reliever, the unconscious portion of the brain that controls the release of endorphins simply acted “as if.” Immediately,