Why do we have brains? To sur­vive (and per­pet­u­ate our genes). Not to be right, or make sense, or be log­i­cal. Which is the whole point behind evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, a very fun field. Any­way, 2 pieces today made me think of this.

One, Could our big brains come from Nean­derthals?, say­ing that “Nean­derthals may have given the mod­ern humans who replaced them a price­less gift — a gene that helped them develop supe­rior brains, U.S. researchers reported Tues­day. And the only way they could have pro­vided that gift would have been by inter­breed­ing, the team at the Howard Hughes Med­ical Insti­tute and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago said.”

Two, Cog­ni­tive Daily has a great post on how Moti­va­tion Affects Visual Per­cep­tion, sum­ma­rized with “These stud­ies pro­vide pretty strong evi­dence, then, that par­tic­i­pants’ object per­cep­tion was affected by their moti­va­tion to eat or drink some­thing that tastes good, or at least by their moti­va­tion not eat or some­thing that looked like it would taste really bad.”

Enjoy,

Alvaro

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