Once upon a time, when I was a young buck working my first real job, I was seconded to a company for a two-week period to help them sort out a personnel database issue in their contact centre.
This required me to travel to Cape Town from my native Johannesburg. Because I was young and in love, I shelled out the extra cash for my then-girlfriend to come with me, as my first three days in Cape Town would be over a weekend. (The promise of hotel room sex in another city was simply too much for my 27-year-old hormones to resist and damn the additional expense) She would return to Johannesburg the following Monday and I could continue solo for the remainder of my secondment.
Upon arrival in the wonderful one-bedroom apartment that my company had secured for us, we discovered that there was a problem with the hot water. I mentioned it to reception and, as an apology, they upgraded us to a massive family unit for the remainder of my girlfriend’s stay. When she left, I got “downgraded”, so to speak, to a two-bedroom unit which was still too large for one person to inhabit alone.
On my second night in my new apartment, I was awoken rudely in the wee hours of the morning by the alarm of the clock radio in the bedroom that I wasn’t using. To this day, I have no idea why it went off and it scared the bejeebers out of me. (The part that really freaked me out, when I reflected on this later, was that it didn’t go off on the first night. So, what had changed between nights? Dun dun DUUUUN!)
I rushed into the room and, still half asleep and bleary-eyed, tried switching the ear-shattering klaxon off. I couldn’t figure it out and eventually resorted to unplugging the offending device, idly wondering to myself if I would have a heart attack if it continued blaring once unplugged, like something out of Stephen King’s 1408.
This occurrence so shook me, especially the part about it happening on the second night, not the first, that I became afraid of the second bedroom in the apartment itself. I would only enter there because the bathroom containing the shower was en suite to this room. I would rush through the room on the way to and from the shower every morning.
In the darker parts of my brain, this second bedroom became The Bad Room and one night, while standing on the balcony talking on the phone with my girlfriend, I could have sworn I saw inexplicable movement in that room. She eventually talked me down and told me that I was imagining things. I was thus prompted to face my fears and, for the remainder of my stay, The Bad Room became the place in which I deliberately stood when brushing my teeth every morning, as a way of affirming to myself that nothing was wrong with said room.
The central thrust of my story — sometimes, when we are left alone, the seed of a silly, or even stupid, thought can fester inside a sealed, solitary skull to the point that it becomes out-and-out insanity. No one is there to assist us in breaking the endless loop of our self-reinforcing logic and eventually logic gives way to the illogical.
And this is one of the points made in the interesting new book by Don Ross and Glenn W Harrison, The Gambling Animal.
Ross and Harrison are, among a laundry list of other qualifications, both professors of econometrics and risk economy. And they have elected to apply their knowledge to the study of two very real disasters that are looming for the human race: global warming and the complete collapse of biodiversity on Earth.
And it is in this study that they put forward a notion that contradicts one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous quotes: humans alone are perfectly capable of being insane and not realising it and actually tend towards that behaviour. Whereas humans who are organised into units, and have access to the common knowledge of the unit, are remarkably capable, resourceful and intelligent.
This has to do with the structure of our brains. While large and metabolically expensive brains are not unique to humans — elephants, dolphins and orcas, for example, all have large, complex brains — the structure of our brains are fairly unique.
We have an unusually high concentration of neurons in the frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that evolved to allow us to understand the consequences of our actions. To understand a future that hasn’t yet occurred, we need to imagine it, and so we are capable of flights of fancy that our animal compatriots are not.
And, it turns out, we are shockingly poor at remembering incidents without them being coloured by this imaginative capability. So, the group exists almost as a “check” to the individual, pooling our common memories to verify them as accurate.
Elephants, on the other hand, exhibit brains that are capable of amazingly accurate, decay-free recall, proving the old saying, “An elephant never forgets” correct. They also organise their societal hierarchy by who can manage risk to the group best. And this book contains a surprisingly large amount of text devoted to a study done with a small herd of elephants in Limpopo and contrasting it with similar studies done with humans.
Ross and Harrison conclude that humans, while especially intelligent in numbers, are astonishingly bad at managing risk. We are risk-averse as individuals, but very willing to gamble with our entire existence as a species, hence the title of the book. And this so-called “ratcheting risk” is escalating to the point where we are endangering our entire planet.
This all adds up to a book that does feel a little doom-and-gloom and is occasionally a little textbook-y, but is still a fascinating, entertaining read that can be recommended if you enjoy this sort of thing.
Just don’t read it in the second bedroom.The Gambling Animal is published by Profile Books.