The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. It is very intriguing when any author indicates their book is about being selfish. Yet, The Elephant in the Brain explores deep insights to self-deception and hidden motives in human behavior.
Indeed readers may reflect and find themselves acknowledging their own motives. Certainly we do not want others to know about them. Therefore we avoid talking or even thinking about our own selfishness. This is Robin’s theme within The Elephant in the Brain.
Yet, Robin’s discovery of stroke victims and split brain patients is completely fascinating. For example, some stroke victims suffer from a disability denial. This is a rare disorder. While it is common for a victim to have lost muscle control of an arm. Yet some patients actually deny anything is wrong with their arm, even though they cannot control any movement.
In addition, a type of hidden behavior demonstrated by patients of corpus callosotomy, patients who for medical reasons undergo the surgical severing of the nerves that connect the left and right hemispheres of their brain. The research of these patients points directly to our collective unconscious behavior.
Part 1: Why we hide our motives
Robin suggests rather accurately that human beings are primates and there is a link to primates being political animals. Fun example of chimps that share social grooming: direct and to the point. Subsequently, as the title then is suggesting, our brains do move beyond ‘hunter/gather’ and is driving us to succeed socially by using deception, knowingly or unknowingly.
