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To reach beyond our comfort zones

Here we are, the end of another year at hand, still confronting the same huge challenges. You know, climate change that’s already making the planet less habitable… democracy imperiled by people who see politics as just the means to power… economic injustice, racial and ethnic prejudice… and, of course, military conflict and the threat of wider wars.

If you wonder why we can’t seem to find our way out of these big dilemmas, it turns out that there’s research suggesting that it’s not because of any natural barrier – but because we have grown lethally inflexible.

Turns out it’s not human nature to be change-averse. In fact, humans were able to emerge as the planet’s dominant species because the relatively large brains of homo sapiens enabled our forebears to adapt to changing environments. This adaptability gave humans an enormous advantage over other creatures – because humans could fashion shelter and clothing for themselves, for example, or move to a safer environment. Adaptability was the key survival strategy.

Then, about a hundred centuries ago, those clever humans began to cultivate crops, which was fundamentally a way of adapting the environment to meet human needs, rather than the other way around. Human history since then has been marked by countless steps not to adapt to nature, but to subjugate it – like, extracting fossil fuels to power industry, and harvesting trees and minerals to build protective structures.

This has worked so well that humans have developed a mindset of how things ought to be done. And along the way, humans grew more rigid, to the point that when it comes to a willingness to try a new approach – to change direction, say, in anticipation of a threat – well, now, we’re less likely to do that than a monkey might be. Really: a monkey. There’s science to back that up.

A few years ago, psychology researchers at Georgia State University published results of studies of human cognitive flexibility compared to capuchin and rhesus monkeys. It’s just one small study, but the findings were the same as earlier studies involving chimpanzees and baboons: Humans, they found, are now more likely than those other primates to stick to a learned strategy, even if it’s inefficient, rather than to try a useful shortcut to a reward. We’ve gotten really stubborn, you know?

Part of the problem, it seems, is structural. Our brains have the ability to be both proactive and reactive. But brain scientists have observed that we are more comfortable in waiting for things to happen to us, rather than being ready for what may lie ahead. It has something to do with white matter organization in the brain.

That’s not ideal in an increasingly complex world, where we can’t depend upon ever-abundant natural resources or moving to the next open space when a threat emerges. In fact, we know that being proactive is a key to successfully navigating modern life.

There are antidotes to this ailment of inflexibility. Many of the solutions are available in our schools. Arts education, for example, teaches flexibility and empathy by revealing to kids that there may be many “right” interpretations to a piece of music, say, or to a visual stimulus. Physical training, including aerobic activity, actually improves what neurophysiologists call “white matter integrity” in the brain, which is what the proactive system relies upon.

So we need to encourage kids to reach beyond their comfort zone, and ours – even at risk of failure, because that’s an important bit of learning. Speaking of failure, there’s another place that the monkeys have an advantage over us. There’s an old African proverb – it goes like this: “It is by trying often that the monkey learns to jump from the tree.”

But a lot of parents and not a few school boards these days are actively trying to combat the healthy flexibility that education can produce. When truth-telling about American history is curtailed because its honest portrayal of our racist heritage makes some white people uncomfortable… or when books are pulled from school libraries because they show kids many different ways that lives are lived… well, then we’re contributing to the hobbling of the next generation’s ability to deal with the world we’re leaving them.

In the face of today’s myriad challenges – dangerous climate change, social inequities, international unrest, and so much more – we need to have the humility to recognize that we must adapt. We’ve got to work on our intellectual flexibility. And, even more, we need to be sure that our kids are learning that sort of adaptability. Rather than waiting until rising seas envelop coastal cities or disenfranchised citizens rise up against entrenched elites, we’ve got to be proactive – and intelligently confront reality.

That is, in making our way forward, we humans need to be as adaptable as monkeys are.

Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack."

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack."
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