💡 Curating your 'collective brain'

Published about 21 hours ago • 1 min read

On a recent episode of Hidden Brain, the topic was the power of the ‘collective brain’ and it punched me in the gut as a flag-waving soloist.

On the surface, the concept isn’t earth-shaking — more people, better thinking — but the guest, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, went into detail about why collaboration activates the human brain:

[The cultural intelligence hypothesis] is the idea that really what our brains have evolved and why they’ve gotten so much bigger than our primate relatives or than our ancestors 2 million years ago is that our brains evolved to acquire, store and organize cultural information.

So it’s not that our brains have evolved to individually solve problems. What we’re really good at is taking advantage of all the information stored in the minds around us and the minds of others, and then we acquire that, and we can even create new things by recombining things that we acquire from different people.

Fascinating, right? It’s the recombination of other people’s thinking that enables intellectual progress. (Academia now comes into focus for me…)

Joe continues:

The collective brain emerges when people are learning from each other because information is flowing around from different minds. And once you have this view, the ability of a society to generate innovation or creative ideas, this process of cumulative cultural evolution is going to depend on:

1) the size of the population
2) the social interconnectedness among individuals, because that allows the information to flow
and 3) the cognitive diversity in those minds

So you’re actually going to get more creativity and more innovation out of a population when you have a larger population that’s more interconnected and more cognitively diverse.

And that’s the collective brain.

And you can see this in places like Silicon Valley, for example, where lots of people are interacting with each other, lots of people are learning from each other. And things are able to progress relatively quickly because people are building very rapidly on top of what other people have built.

Hearing or reading this explanation might make you think:

Well, hell, I don’t have any of that built-in collective intelligence that comes from a team, or department, or building full of coworkers. Going solo must be a disadvantage.

And it could be if you stop there. Or we could realize that it just means we as solos have to actively curate our collective brain.

Not just have to — we get to!

With peers. With clients. With outreach.

With LinkedIn. With conferences.

With webinars. With communities.

With others unlike us.

And with others very much like us who are looking, needing, craving that collective brain just as much as we are.

Are you curating your collective brain?

Are you doing so actively?

Who’s in it?

💡

-Wes

Check out the full Hidden Brain episode titled "The Past Is Never Dead" on

[Hidden Brain] [Spotify]

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💡 Curating your 'collective brain'

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