Joseph Henrich

Yes, that's right.

So in the picture that I'm painting, our institutions, our languages, and our technologies feed back and they shape our psychology.

Now, of course, what we just talked about was gene culture co-evolution.

So in the long run, they might affect our genetic evolution.

But what's underappreciated is how much these things shape our psychology in the short term because our minds have evolved through this gene culture co-evolutionary process.

to adapt developmentally as we're growing up in these different environments.

So something like our cell phones, you know, are going to affect things like our memory and our attention.

So they're actually changing how things are processed in our minds.

One of my favorite examples of this is, you know, for most of human history, people didn't read.

It was really not until the 16th century that large segments of the population began to read.

But when you learn to read as a child, it actually reshapes the wiring in your brain so that you get thicker corpus callosum.

That's the information highway that connects the right and left hemispheres.

You get specialized circuitry in your left ventral hemisphere.

And you get more whole brain activation even when you hear spoken language.

So it doesn't just affect the reading.

It actually affects how we process spoken language.

So it's just a case where a cultural practice, learning to read, actually changes a bunch of things about our brains and about how we take in information.

Yeah, I really think that that is a core idea, and I bring that out in The Weirdest People in the World in my book.

So when these monogamous nuclear families formed and these impersonal institutions became created, people were released from the bonds of their kinship.

And we know from historical data that they began moving around Europe.