The Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives Analysis

According to urban legend, humans only tap into 10 percent of their brain’s full capabilities. Whether this is true or not, no one really knows, but it is easy to come to the conclusion that human brains are among, if not the most, fascinating, complex, and powerful processing units to exist. Calculate 99*99 in your head. Chances are, most people cannot do this type of calculation in their head. Why? Brain Bugs: How The Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives, by Dean Buonomano, gives us insight into this and many other hurdles humans must overcome on a daily basis due to outdated brain features that were once advantageous for survival. When evolutionary adaptations are taken out of context, they often result in deleterious effects for the organism.
Our brain has still managed to keep up and come up with magnificent ideas even without being upgraded thanks to its plasticity. Furthermore, on our daily struggles with financial decisions, because in a cold world that did not assure the survival of anyone, only fast, short-term decisions that kept us alive mattered. The result of that has been our brains predisposition to perceive the value of any expected reward to decrease with the passage of time. Buonomano’s argument is that like before, any immediate reward was better for the survival than any reward that reward waiting when survival was not by any means ensured (100). This need for immediate gratification afflicts everyone to a certain extent. Even though it is possible to train the mind to reap the benefits of the waiting game, the wiring of our brain leads us to make short-term decisions that have short lived positive effects on our lives and wallets. There are more noticeable and extreme “brain bugs” that often stop some of us from doing certain things or going to certain places at all costs. Fear, like Buonomano and many others have argued, has kept us alive over generations, but we now fear many things that are no longer a threat to us. I will restrict my argument to people of developed countries, because there are places and
These brain bugs affect my everyday life, some more than others. I think one of my biggest issues is my inability to see the value of a potential reward in the distant future. Temporal discounting is something I struggle with on a daily basis. I love to workout and I know it takes many, many months and often years to reach a goal in the gym. So when someone places a nice, big piece of chocolate cake in front of me, I know that it will have a negative impact on my goals, but my desire for immediate gratification overrides that knowledge. In order to satisfy my desire, I have that piece of cake. Well then I have satisfied a short-term desire, but overlooked a long-term goal that I work towards everyday. So in that respect, I am weak and I work to improve myself everyday. Not only does immediate gratification and temporal discounting affect my health, but my wallet as well. Often times I buy things I do not need, because it feels so good and the negative effect of spending the money does not become real until I really need the money to buy something else. It is often hard to see that many things are not necessities, and only satisfy our materialistic desires in that moment. Now I am not saying I go around spending my money on whim left and right, but I do sometimes spend money on things I don’t necessarily need and later end up asking myself, “was it really worth it?” This is a problem that can be addressed by simply working on being more patient and rational