Chapter 10 Introduction

Young man: Robin Skjoldborg/Cultura/Getty Images; landscape: David Henderson/OJO Images/Getty Images
Licensed Material is being used for illustrative purposes only; person depicted in the licensed Material is a model

Life is full or problems and always has been. Solving some of these problems is a matter of life and death—finding food, avoiding becoming food for another animal, identifying friends and enemies—while others are of lesser importance—deciding what to wear to a party, navigating your way to and from home, answering the multiple-choice questions on an exam. Solving each of these problems requires intelligence. Compared with other species, humans are not the most graceful, nor the strongest, nor the swiftest, nor the fiercest, nor the gentlest, nor the most long-lived, nor the most resistant to the poisons accumulating in our atmosphere. We do, however, fancy ourselves to be the most intelligent of animals; and, at least by our own definitions of intelligence, our fancy is apparently correct. We are the animal that knows and reasons; that classifies and names the other animals; that tries to understand all things, including ourselves. We are also the animal that tells one another what we know, with the effect that each generation of our species starts off with more knowledge, if not more wisdom, than the previous one.

In Chapter 9 we defined memory broadly as all the information we store, whether for long periods or only fleetingly, and all the mechanisms we have for manipulating that information. But what is the purpose of memory, thus defined? From an evolutionary perspective, there is no value in reminiscence for its own sake. What’s past is past; we can’t do anything about it. We can, however, influence our future. The evolutionary functions of memory are to understand our present situation, recognize and solve problems posed by that situation, anticipate the future, and make plans that will help us prepare for and in some ways alter that future for our own (or our genes’) well-being. Our memory of the past is useful to the degree that it helps us understand and deal adaptively with the present and the future. The processes by which we use our memories in these adaptive ways are referred to as reasoning, and our general capacity to reason is referred to as intelligence. In this chapter we explore reasoning and intelligence, beginning with the ways in which people approach problems.