How the West Came to Dominate Our Brains

This week on Innovation Hub:
About 1500 years ago, the world was a very different place; Pope Gregory was spreading Catholicism far and wide, a plague was running rampant, and some dominoes were about to start falling. The end of that cascade would result in a world in which a certain group of people started to think quite differently from those who had gone before them. Their brains began to change, the societies they built thrived and they grew so influential and culturally dominant that their way of thinking permeated our entire psychology. In other words, the changes that began 1500 years ago created W.E.I.R.D. people — a Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic population that grew into a global powerhouse. That’s according to Joseph Henrich, chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and author of “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” He writes that people who learn to read, who are educated in a Western way – no matter where they live in the world – have brains that look and operate unlike more traditional human brains.