Explore more in Culture, Values and History

Book excerpts

What is the Patterning Instinct? Is it unique to humans?​

How culture sculpts our brains – before we even know it

Are we "ensnared in an inescapable web" of culture?

Videos

The Conundrum of Admiral Zheng He and Christopher Columbus

Humanity's Changing Metaphors of Nature

Vertical Divider

Our Drive To Find
​Patterns Of Meaning 

Think of whatever we do that animals don’t do: talking, reading, driving a car, planning for retirement, or making music. These uniquely human activities require the involvement of our highly developed prefrontal cortex (pfc), especially during the period when we’re learning them for the first time. These pfc-mediated modes of thought may be called our conceptual consciousness.

Now think of what we share with other mammals: hunger, sexual urges, pain, aggression, desire for warmth, caring for our offspring – we can call this collection of cognitive experiences our animate consciousness. While many of the pfc’s advanced functions exist to some degree in other creatures – chimpanzees, dolphins and parrots, for example – their predominance in humans is overwhelmingly different in magnitude and scope, accounting largely for our current domination of the world.

How does our pfc allow us to think in this way? Cognitive neuroscientists tell us that the pfc is the most connected part of the brain and one of its primary functions is to make sense of all the inputs it receives from other parts of the nervous system: the senses, primary emotions, feelings and memories.

Our pattern detector

One important way it does this is to detect patterns in what it receives: What’s new? What’s recurrent? What’s important? What correlates with something else? Out of these patterns, as infants, we begin to make sense of our surroundings: recognizing family members, picking up on speech formations, and gradually learning to become members of our community. As we grow older, we continue to rely on our pfc to make meaning of all the different events we experience and to construct models for how to live our lives.

Through the capabilities of the pfc, our species has evolved a patterning instinct: an instinct unique to humans that lends its name to the title of this book. It deserves to be called an instinct because it emerges in human behavior at the earliest stages of development, well before any cultural learning has taken place. In fact, this instinct is what’s responsible for an infant’s ability to engage in cultural learning.

As we’ll see in a later chapter, when an infant is only nine months old, she has already begun to identify the unique phonetic patterns of her native language, and by twelve months she’s learned to ignore phonetic units that don’t exist in her own language. No-one tells her to do this; she does it by instinct.

Our drive for meaning

This human instinct for patterning is embedded in our cognition, maintaining its activity throughout our lives. We create narratives about our past and future, we construct an identity for ourselves, we categorize things, putting more value on some and less on others. And, just like our distant ancestors, we continually search for meaning in our lives and the world around us.

Somehow, though, this drive to make sense of the world around us, while it’s given us so much that we value, has also brought our civilization to the brink of collapse. How could this have happened? Is it an inevitable result of human nature, or is our present situation culturally driven: a product of particular structures of thought that could conceivably be re-patterned?

​The answer to this question – and its implications – may be one of the most important factors affecting the future direction of the human race.

​
Excerpted from The Patterning Instinct, Introduction