The Nature of a Nerd
Have you seen the movie "Inside Out?" It's a Disney/Pixar production about a girl named Riley who moves to a new town. The story focuses on how her five strongest emotions—joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear—help her cope with all the changes she experiences in the movie. The five emotions are housed in a sort of control tower inside Riley’s head. However, if this setting were more biologically accurate, disgust and fear would be located in a separate control tower closer to the older "center" of Riley's brain. That is because disgust and fear have helped curtail human behavior for many thousands of years longer than our "newer" emotions and essentially have the power to override how we react to things. I find this revelation fascinating. In fact, I have created some characters of my own which I use to investigate what life might have been like many thousands of years ago. In this chapter of their story, cavedwellers Jerome and Claire follow their emotions/instincts and learn to accept a fellow tribe member called Greta—and Greta is the world's first nerd.
There was once a tribe of 100 people who lived 40,000 years ago. The leader of the tribe is called Jerome, and he is a bad-ass. In some ways he is your typical prehistoric leader: He is strong, healthy, has lots of life experience, and appreciates dependability from his tribe. He also does not really care what the members of the tribe think of him. He has an air of confidence that demands attention, but that attention is not a requirement of Jerome’s confidence. He did not ask for the job of leader—others just noticed he was really good at adapting to his environment and started copying what he was doing. In other ways, though, Jerome is pretty unique. He is concerned about the group that is following him around, and not just what is best for him. He also has equanimity, meaning he can function “rationally” even under high-stress situations. Fear, specifically, seems to have little control over Jerome when he is out on hunts; he appears to benefit from the extra boost of energy that fear provides, but he is able to stay focused on the challenge at hand and does not panic. While it might be easy to chalk this ability up to how many times he has been on hunts and in other stressful situations, his fellow dwellers are still enormously impressed . . . and Claire is among his biggest fans. Jerome also tries to see things from his followers’ perspectives, and the result is that he has a better idea of where his tribe-members are coming from. It is because of this habit that Jerome does not require his tribe members to follow a strict hierarchy, yet he still expects his followers to behave in a predictable, organized fashion when it comes to daily tribal happenings. And he does all this without saying very much. While there are a few dwellers around the campsites who are quickly developing the gift of gab, Jerome does more listening and observing . . . and that is how resident nerd Greta came to be an exception to the “different is bad” rule of Paleolithic life and earned some extra authority in the tribe.
But Claire, who was relatively new to Jerome’s tribe, is among the last to totally trust Greta. Greta acts as the tribe’s healer, but when Claire first observed her, she was confused by Greta’s distracted behavior. Greta did not always seem to be aware of her surroundings, sometimes wandering off to look for herbs for her concoctions. Other gatherers would have to scare off the saber-toothed tigers who are stalking her because Greta would not have noticed that they were approaching. Claire, on the other hand, is constantly in-tune with her surroundings. She is well-aware that dwellers who are loners have a tendency to get picked off pretty easily. But Greta is very valuable to the tribe, and Jerome has demonstrated on many occasions that Greta was to be protected. If Greta was not there to heal people, the tribe would suffer even more than they do. Claire cannot do the amazing things Greta does to help the tribe, but the way Claire can help her tribe is to do HER jobs, without fail. Claire is a more typical cavedweller: she is a slave to her emotions, and at first, Claire does not like the way Greta acts. At some level, Claire thinks Greta should also be required to pay attention to her surroundings, but there was not much time for thought during the Stone Age. In addition to foraging for food, it is Claire’s job to do what Jerome and everyone else is doing, and that habit was a very good one to have.
Now even though Claire goes through life simply reacting to her environment, there is still a lot going on in her head. In fact, when I say there was not much time for Claire to think, that is not technically true. A human’s brain is constantly working, and while it makes up just 2% of a person’s body-weight, it requires 20% of a person’s energy to function. One might consider Claire’s style of thinking “lazy” since she usually just does what the people around her are doing, but a more accurate description would be that the way she uses her brain conserves bodily resources and works efficiently. For Claire, emotional decisions are easier. They are quick reactions designed by nature that increase her chance for survival. General patterns are what Claire pays attention to and details are not required to keep her alive. In addition, her flickers of logic are completely overrun when she is under stress, and considering her living conditions, that is exactly how she should behave. If she stopped to figure out exactly which of the various predators were sneaking up on her (is it the right season for Paleo-wolves to be in this area?) and then consider her reaction to that animal (is the wind blowing too hard for me to accurately throw my spear?), she would certainly be killed. And since patterns are how Claire sees the world, she is also dependent on knowing the status of people around her. Dwellers who are leaders have clout, and if she wants to fit in to the tribe’s structure, she had better know who is who. It is lucky for Claire that she is so good at following her instincts—but it is also lucky for Claire’s tribe that Greta is able to do a little extra thinking for them.
As their resident nerd, Greta not only uses her brain differently than Jerome or Claire, but her brain is physically a bit different too. Starting around 200,000 years ago, “almost humans” gradually experienced an “add-on” to their minds, and Greta is especially good at using hers. Turns out it was more biologically efficient to build-out a more modern part of the brain rather than updating the original. This newer part was eventually better at language and logic than the older parts, but it all started with the “more evolved” ability to process details— and Greta keeps getting lost in them. She does not always do what everyone else is doing, and the status of others is not the type of detail Greta is into either. She is more interested in ideas than people, but she does instinctively help a fellow dweller when they need it. In addition, she did not fit into the tribe’s hierarchy until she earned the job of healer. Greta notices only most of the same things in her environment that Claire does, and Greta will get very quiet and still when she was really thinking hard; One might even call her depressed. It seems she can ignore the older, more reactionary parts of her mind when she is in this state, which could mean the limited physical energy reserved for her brain is being spent on just the newer part. But of course, even in Greta’s head, emotions can still overwhelm logic, so when Greta is startled by something in her environment, she goes from thinking to feeling in a BIG way. Her mood swings are probably interpreted as unstable by her fellow dwellers, which means Greta will never be seen as a level-headed leader like Jerome. But that is certainly fine with her. Greta depends more heavily on her tribe for her survival and lives in a vulnerable state. But lucky for her, Jerome has good followers like Claire who trust his judgement.
Until the dawn of the Information Age, modern nerds have existed in a pretty vulnerable state as well. They are often characterized as being too trusting or less socially savvy—perhaps as awkward and trusting as Greta had once behaved with her fellow dwellers. But today’s nerds can benefit from the fact that attaining power no longer requires physical strength, so people who have mental prowess have been gaining social ground. Nerds are still seen as really smart, and it’s easy for them to retain and share details/facts. They can sometimes make the assumption that anyone else can handle lots of facts and details as well, and this may help explain why nerds are also known to over-share them sometimes. And when nerds do attain some social status/power, like Bill Gates for example, they can be pretty generous with their monetary earnings. Some “descendants of Greta” appear to be group-oriented, although they may not do things like invent computers for the sole purpose of benefiting other people. It could be that their sharp focus on new ideas accidentally ends up helping others sometimes. And ironically, at least one modern nerd’s conscious goal of using computers to reduce human error and connect people may have unintentionally hurt many by reducing our opportunities to interact face-to-face with each other.
Modern life has become less emotionally dependent and more “nerd friendly,” and as ideas that cultivate efficiency are proliferated across the globe, it appears that not everyone has benefited from this shift. Really smart modern people probably still use the newer parts of their brain more easily than most, and the general increased focus on facts over emotions (starting with Western society) has reduced our ability to read each other...and not acknowledging our emotional needs is not good for humans anywhere. If nerds really are better at using the newer part of their brains, they could be considered more evolved—but that does not necessarily mean they are any better at being human.
Listen to this soundtrack for Nature of a Nerd
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Zxf8GC0tco4expvgbZYiI?si=B6eNk48wQaujxab67QrqXA
References
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