Fading are the days when being born the son of a doctor means I’ll be a doctor. Or being born a woman means that I will be a homemaker. The increased freedom is wonderful, but even in this modern world these decisions have consequences and have to be considered in terms of the raw meat that backs behavior: the brain.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, brains are complex structures with one job: keeping their genetic code in existence. Human brains do this in large part by connecting observations together and recognizing patterns that can be exploited. Maybe I notice that little trees start from around the area where bit trees drop nuts. I connect nuts to trees, abstract things out to other types of seeds and, voila, agriculture. This gives me a definite survival advantage over the squirrels that just see trees and nuts.
The problem though is that there’s simply a limit to how much our gray matter can handle. Studies on working memory have fairly consistently limited us to about 7 ± 2 (2.5 bits) of information in our head at a time.
