Cognitive Fitness

Fitness is the ability to solve solvable problems which stand between a living thing and its aim, and to succeed or adapt if a problem has no solution. Survival and reproduction are the two primary goals of all life, and humans have additional desires, both good and bad. The variations and ambiguities (why we like, what we like) of right and wrong, both subjective and social, result in secondary motivations and problems which are unique to humans.

Simple problems of life can be solved by other brains which are less advanced than ours, and we can think and do that which is complex. However, this ability to deal with the complexity is itself complicated, and, in general, many human experiences and behaviors – nihilism, suffering without any apparent reason, medical conditions because of addictions and sedentary lifestyle, drug overdose deaths, and suicides, for example – are unlikely to be found in other organisms.

Life forms that move in space-time need to be fit to survive and reproduce, but we use our minds more than our bodies, and while primal neural features are more or less shared among all animals, our higher-order thinking separates us from the rest. Our thinking is the latest and most advanced ability in the evolution of the brain, and with mind-boggling capabilities, it has weaknesses too, leading to the possibility of collective or personal harm and the stunning reversal of fundamental longing to live and procreate in many cases. Moreover, the intellect of the human brain is largely untapped and not all of us use it to its maximum. In general, it is the gene-environment interaction that can activate a genetic ability, and without trying to break the subjective boundaries regularly, the potential of all the available intellectual (or physical) traits is likely to go to waste, and the power of thinking, if not directed toward something good, can be our own worst enemy.

Thinking can control itself and the rest of the elements of mind – desires, emotions, and behaviors, for instance – and it can be employed to define good and bad, stop self-destruction or mediocrity, and aim high and succeed, as far as it is possible. Therefore, the fitness of our thinking (involving intellect or executive cognitive functions) – cognitive fitness – must be included in the discussion of fitness.

Physical and psychological fitness can complement each other. Leaving aside genetic and environmental factors which are beyond our direct conscious cognitive control, taking care of physical fitness is straightforward – exercise, eat a healthy diet, maintain a healthy weight, and improve posture. Our ancestors wandered much of the day to find food and were physically fit by default, but now we can eat unhealthy processed food all day sitting on our couch. The body is still the same, as it has not evolved in the last few thousand years, and the huge mismatch between the body and the current environment has turned a solution – easily available food – into a problem – health conditions because of obesity. The nervous system has also not evolved recently, and the mismatch between mind and modern environment is extremely complex, causing even more sophisticated social and personal problems. Intellectual interventions are now needed to manage the hidden mismatch between genes and the environment, and cognitive fitness can facilitate that.

Healthy eating and physical activity can prevent several chronic conditions, and cognitive fitness can help in the execution of the steps needed for physical fitness and overall health. Cognitive fitness can also minimize and manage stress (or other detrimental or dismal states) and associated negative side effects on health. As cognitive fitness can address the overall complexity of life as well, it can get far more convoluted than its counterpart, physical fitness.

Individual survival depends on the safety of a society, which is usually taken for granted, and hence societal fitness – fitness of ideas floating in a society – is also critical, especially when the functional societies keep falling with time or some disappear altogether, and social systems have also started to pollute our planet, armed with thinking and its products – science and technology.

Thinking is both conscious and subconscious. A mind can generate only a few new functional ideas in a lifetime, and thinking has a huge historical influence, both evolutionary and social. As a result, the fitness of collective thinking, novel and primitive, self-aware and subliminal, matters for the future of humanity. We need to find ways to deal with the social and cortical complexity and protect people and working societies from recurrent external destruction or self-destruction and carefully and collectively advance living systems by using our intellect and keeping track of changes and lessons across extremely large biological and social times.

"Over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020." - CDC

"Worldwide, about 0.5 million deaths are attributable to drug use." - WHO

"Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year." - CDC

"Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day." - CDC

"An estimated 95,000 people (approximately 68,000 men and 27,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third-leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity." - NIH

"Alcohol consumption contributes to 3 million deaths each year globally as well as to the disabilities and poor health of millions of people. Overall, harmful use of alcohol is responsible for 5.1% of the global burden of disease." - WHO

"In 2017, an estimated 11 million U.S. adults aged 18 or older had at least one major depressive episode with severe impairment. This number represented 4.5% of all U.S. adults." - NIH

"An estimated 31.1% of U.S. adults experience any anxiety disorder at some time in their lives." - NIH

"Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds." - WHO

"Suicide was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 54. There were more than two and a half times as many suicides (48,344) in the United States as there were homicides (18,830)." - NIH

"Unhealthy dietary habits and sedentary behavior together account for approximately 300,000 deaths every year." - Office of the Surgeon General (US)

These are only a few unfortunate examples of our psychological vulnerabilities resulting from the extreme complexity of the nervous system interacting with nature, and while there are endless practical problems that cannot always be solved, the usual unnecessary suffering arising from all the dependence, disorders, delusions, and stress cannot be measured. It is also hard to know how many minds actually activate their sleeping superhuman strengths and thrive, even in the difficulty.

It is not easy to find any other life form dying by suicide or substance abuse or suffering without any authentic biological reason, but we struggle with all of these, even in the most developed societies with the best social security and biological comfort ever. Other living things do not have the human brain, but we do, and while our brains can make our life extremely beautiful, they can also make it unnecessarily difficult. Fundamental psychological and philosophical wisdom and cognitive skills which can manage the complexity of the human brain and life are not introduced to young minds before subjective reality sets in, and many of us are left on our own to learn it the hard way with some irreversible individual and social damage.

Fitness usually means physical fitness (for us, in the modern world) or reproductive success (survival of the fittest, in biology) but there's much more to this than meets the eye. Now that physical fitness requires psychological efforts and many take their own lives before leaving their genetic copies behind, one may wonder when cognitive fitness will be addressed by societies, so that we can not only be fit and survive but also succeed by making the best use of our intellect.

According to an estimate by Luke Kemp of Cambridge, the average age of civilization is close to 340 years.

"At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century." - NYT

"The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today." - Richard Foster - Yale

"Healthy marriages are good for couples’ mental and physical health. They are also good for children; growing up in a happy home protects children from mental, physical, educational and social problems. However, about 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher." - APA

"4.2 million deaths every year occur as a result of exposure to ambient (outdoor) air pollution." - WHO

"Contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause 485 000 diarrhoeal deaths each year." - WHO

"Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today, responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths." - The Lancet Commission

Functional societies die with time, and in the modern world, science and technology may be doing more harm than good with rampant pollution and weapons of mass destruction, among other things. Instead of trying to solve some complex problems for all, many minds are now wasting the opportunity to do personal and social good and are addicted to the media and modern devices, among other regular old things. Psychological vulnerabilities of the nervous system are exploited by those who can, and until we collectively teach young minds about the existence of distinct domains of objective and subjective realities and ways to effectively deal with the combined complexity of the natural, nervous, and social systems, before they are cast into rigid neural stones, we will keep learning the same social lessons again and again.

Political and philosophical principles prevalent in societies are not settled even for the basic things, and we still have to find smart ways to manage the gene-environment mismatch, stop self-destruction, and use science, technology, and philosophy for the good.

Among other magical things, the human brain can perceive, process, store, and retrieve information, but the information in the universe is infinite and the brain is finite. The forces of the universe are also not always controllable, predictable, and knowable. Dealing with infinite information in the uncertainty and mystery is an extremely complex computational problem, and the brain solves it by focusing on the finite and interpreting the reality at a specific scale of space-time, using a number of computational tricks and short-cuts, to survive and reproduce. As the brain interacts with the impenetrable interfaces of reality, perfection is elusive but pragmatism is possible, with the possibilities of errors. Some errors can be obvious, but when an error appears real, it becomes an illusion, and all that our brains can perceive, think, desire, feel, and do is subject to limits, errors, and illusions.

Illusions of desires, thoughts, and emotions are hard to come to terms with, but visual illusions can easily reveal the computational deceptions of the brain. For example, the horizontal bar in the image below has the same shade of gray from left to right, but we do not see it that way.

Our brains are primarily organized around vision, and the one 3D image that we see is created from the two 2D upside-down images, formed in each of our eyes, with a blind spot in each of them, and as there are no photoreceptor cells at blind spots where the optic nerve leaves the retina, objectively we should see two uniform patches of some color, but we do not. The conversion from two 2D images to one 3D image is mind-bogglingly complicated and lightning-fast, but this magic can be misleading and it is always incomplete. While converting two 2D upside-down images to one 3D image, our brains are free to do whatever they can, to manage and make sense of the infinite information available in the universe, in a breathtakingly complicated manner – all the atoms in a fruit become just one object which we can eat, for example. The fast and pragmatic interpretation of the information – to assign practical purpose to the objects or information in the world so that we can live – can never be perfect all the time, given the perceptual and processing limits of the nervous system, and meaning is given preference over objectivity, speed over accuracy, and something which is unreal may appear real and incomplete may seem complete.

We can see food, people, predators, tools, and other objects in the landscape so that we can eat and survive, but we cannot see billions of cells, molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles in an apple and we cannot see the edge of the universe, if any. Resolution of what we can see can be enhanced and visual perception can be extended across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with the help of technology, but what is beyond biological perceptions and modern engineering is unknowable, and technology is created by biological brains. The rest of the limits of the brain are also obvious: one person cannot memorize all the books in the world, cannot learn all the possible physical and cognitive skills, cannot hear all the frequencies, cannot experience all the possible experiences, and cannot multiply two extremely big numbers without using paper and a pen or a calculator.

In addition to distorting information when it is available, as we have seen in the image above, brains are also free to create information, when it is absent. For example, the missing information in the blind spots of our eyes is filled from the information available in the immediate surroundings of the blind spot, and as a result, the blind spot looks exactly the same as its surrounding and disappears.

Another feature of the nervous system is that, in general, it does not tell us about its boundaries, distortions, and tricks. Complexity is reduced with computational shortcuts, and all the magic is done for us with a hint of overconfidence and we do not generally create doubt in what we perceive.

Overall, what we see is an extremely limited, meaningful, distorted, created, and overconfident interpretation of a part of the unfathomable reality. An incredibly impressive computational solution – perception, for example – which lets us function in the real world can be problematic if its hidden errors can make our life difficult. Luckily, illusions of visual perception are not only harmless, they actually help us to act and function. However, the brain employs similar strategies, as used in vision, for thoughts, desires, and emotions, and just one such delusion can be enough to make our lives miserable from the inside, without any outside difficulty or complexity.

For example, when we predict the future in a hopeless or depressed state of mind, there seems to be no hope or happiness, but that is likely to be an illusion as long as there are no permanent conditions in a free society. Each and every detail of the future cannot be predicted with absolute accuracy and prediction is an extremely complex computational problem. Our brains solve this problem by taking information from the present and infusing it into the future – as in the case of blind spots in eyes – and therefore, the future looks similar to the present. The future is created from the present and presented to us in an overconfident manner, and we tend to trust the neural simulation but that could be an error. As long as we are alive and have health, there is almost always hope, if we do not stop and keep using thinking at its best.

Whatever comes to the mind can be elusive, but we tend to trust it, and that is a fundamental problem. Chaos and confusion can consume the soul and a mind cannot deal with infinite complexity. Confidence in the contents of the consciousness can be comforting but a solution can be a problem.

Related Resources: List of Cognitive Biases, List of Common Cognitive Distortions, Heuristics, Visual Illusions, Image Formation in the Eye, Blind Spot, The Electromagnetic Spectrum