War. Huh! (Dum dum dum!) What’s our brain good for?
“Human brains were not built for comfortable lives”, writes Nicholas Wright. Which rather raises the question, what were they built for? Well, among other things, “Every human brain is built to win – or at least survive a fight.”
Dr Wright uses the topography and geography of the human brain as a chapter by chapter means of exploring its many functions and show how it does its job. He shows you where your basic drives such as hunger, thirst and sleep are located – the hypothalamus and the thalamous, since you ask – and navigates all the way to the prefrontal cortex where you do your strategic planning and your thinking ahead.
This is not ivory-tower reflection on his part. As well as being a medical doctor and a neuro-scientist, he is an advisor to the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence on how better understanding of the human brain can help us win, or at least not lose coming wars. We are already facing a Putin-led Russia waging an aggressive war in Europe, and who would rule out China invading Taiwan in the foreseeable future? Dr Wright warns us that we can no longer take winning such conflicts for granted.
The book elegantly uses examples from military history to illustrate its points, and delves into the psychology of human volition to explore its arguments. It also speculates on what the advent of AI will mean for the coming conflicts, and how we might bend the technology to our purposes. Can we, for instance, code in morality?
Nicholas Wright – MacMillan – £22
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