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to, questioning our perceptions and beliefs about the world around us. The protagonist of Carl Sagan’s book Contact , 7 an astronomer named Ellie Arroway, is denied the opportunity to travel into space to meet an alien race because she does not believe in God. She is told in no uncertain terms that 95 percent of the world’s population believes in some form of supreme being. She is asked, in effect, “How can you, a nonbeliever, be trusted to represent our species?”
    Consensual validity is a very powerful force. In many cases, if those around you believe it, it must be true. It is also a prime example of what are called heuristics, or shortcuts that save each member of the group (or species) from having to reevaluate the same evidence. Just accept what your neighbor says and save a few calories of effort. But it is also a dangerous impediment to growth or progress when the belief in question may not be true. It takes considerable courage to stand up, as Ellie Arroway does, and say, “Yes, I want this mission very much and I believe I am highly qualified to accept it. But I do not share the belief of the group. I have examined the same evidence and reached a different conclusion.”
    This book is about standing apart. It examines the workings of the human mind and identifies some of the areas in which our minds are likely to misfire. The neuroscientists and psychologists who conducted much of the research we discuss deserve great credit. Admittedly, it is easier to hold unconventional views within science, but it still remains difficult for the human mind to analyze itself. Those same limited, highly constrained mental processes we are about to dissect are the very tools we will be using to perform the operation. You’ve got to be quite logical to find gaps in logic. You have to be highly perceptive to see perceptual illusions. In short, this might have been a far easier task for another species to perform.

IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT
    “What’s wrong with how I use my mind?”
    To begin with, you were born with a device that was designed for service at least 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Are you content to operate it on the same automatic-pilot settings that served your ancestors? Assuming there is some flexibility in the system (and new evidence of “neuroplasticity” seems to suggest there is), why not consider making a few adjustments? Admittedly, we can’t change cognitive architecture overnight, but at least we can change our slavish dependence on it. This is not to disparage the original autopilot settings. They were probably a good idea for our hominin ancestors, who understood little about the physical universe around them. But those autopilot settings may have long ago outlived their usefulness.
    Consider Steven Pinker’s statement, “The mind is what the brain does.” 8 In that spirit, I follow the lead of much contemporary scholarship (e.g., Atran and Norenzayan) 9 and make no distinction between the terms mind and brain . Plainly, in the latter case we are talking about a physical organ, but it is ultimately the mind—that is, what the brain does —that is of concern to us and that provides the phenotype on which natural selection operates.
    I have a friend who sometimes looks at my wardrobe or record collection and says (lovingly), “The sixties are over! Get over it!” Sometimes I want to say to our species (perhaps not so lovingly), “The Pleistocene era is over. Get over it!” We’re living in so-called modern times. A lot of the default settings in the human mind are really showing their age. They are no longer necessary. Continuing the analogy to a physical device, the autopilot mode can be safely turned off in favor of more-enlightened manual settings that reflect thousands of years of human knowledge and civilization. We can safely open the package, reason independently, and move past those fail-safe, one-size-fits-all, safety- and comfort-oriented settings that got our