A groundbreaking and timely book about how evolutionary biology can
explain our black-and-white brains, and a lesson in how we can escape
the pitfalls of binary thinking.
Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary,
black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then,
it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary
brain was highly adept at detecting risk: the ability to analyze threats
and respond to changes in the sensory environment--a drop in
temperature, the crack of a branch--was essential to our survival as a
species.
Since then, the world has evolved--but we, for the most part, haven't.
Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency
to "force quit: " to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into
manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeon-hole, and,
above all, draw lines where in reality there are none. In our modern,
interconnected world, it might seem like we are ill-equipped to deal
with the challenges we face--that living with a binary brain is like
trying to navigate a teeming city center with a map that shows only
highways.
In Black-and-White Thinking, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton
pulls back the curtains of the mind to reveal a new way of thinking
about a problem as old as humanity itself. While our instinct for
categorization often leads us astray, encouraging polarization, rigid
thinking, and sometimes outright denialism, it is an essential component
of the mental machinery we use to make sense of the world. Simply put,
unless we perceived our environment as a chessboard, our brains wouldn't
be able to play the game.
Using the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary
biology, Dutton shows how we can optimize our tendency to categorize and
fine-tune our minds to avoid the pitfalls of too little, and too much,
complexity. He reveals the enduring importance of three "super
categories"--fight or flight, us versus them, and right or
wrong--and argues that they remain essential to not only convincing
others to change their minds but to changing the world for the better.
Black-and-White Thinking is a scientifically informed wake-up call for
an era of increasing extremism and a thought-provoking, uplifting guide
to training our gray matter to see that gray really does matter.
