Joseph Henrich: belief

Transcript context

…As you know, it’s a common 18th-century theme that the division of labor possibly will make us stupid or uninteresting. It seems that was wrong in the 18th century. Nicholas Carr has argued, “Well, Google makes us all shallow, and we lose the ability to remember things.” Will that also be wrong? The thing is, we probably have been losing memory ability. As soon as we can write, we can offload lots of information that we normally have to keep in our heads. I’ve always been impressed, living in small-scale societies, the number of stories that people tell over campfires and just the amount of, say, folk biological information — information about plants and animals and what’s poisonous and what you can eat and what you can’t eat, and how you have to process it. There’s just this encyclopedic knowledge, which I would just use the handbook for, for a lot of that information. That’s not available to you. We’ve been gradually figuring out ways to download stuff. I think that’s the Google problem, is that we have less stuff in our heads, but our ability to do things can still expand. From what I understand, people had larger brains 20,000 or 30,000 years ago. Brain size, roughly, is correlated with intelligence. Is it possible that they were smarter than we are? We’re a kind of mental cripple, in a way? But we get by, because, in essence, we’re riding on the back of this marvelous cultural evolution.…

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