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Five days ago we started an important new dialogue — one that just might save us.

We began by looking at all of the dangerous problems we face — a worldwide recession, climate change, pandemic viruses, terrorism, debt, and epidemic autism, breast cancer, and depression — as one problem rather than individual challenges. These problems have become too multilayered, too dynamic, too chaotic, and too complex for the capabilities the human brain has evolved to this point. In fact, every civilization eventually hits a cognitive threshold and gridlock is the first sign: it becomes unable, for multiple generations, to solve its most dangerous threats. The second is the substitution of beliefs for facts wherein public policy becomes driven by unproven myths and superstitions. In today's society, we show both signs.

That said, at no time in history has there been more reason for hope. Modern man has tools and technology that ancient civilizations did not, thus the opportunity to break the pattern of human ascension and decline has never been more within reach.

In addition to technology, we have proven and effective high failure rates models for situations where the right solutions cannot be distinguished from the wrong ones (e.g., the venture capital model). What's more, we are also the first civilization to be able to look under the skull at the human brain and see what it is doing as it attempts to solve problems that are too complex for the left and right brain methods we have evolved to this point. Neuroscientists who study the brain's potential have discovered a third form of problem solving which occurs randomly and rarely but has been shown to exist in every human being. This form of problem solving is called "insight" and it is a sudden, novel connection of data that produces an ingenious solution to problems. It is a revelation to discover that insights are not the providence of Einstein, Newton, Archimedes, or Nobel Prize winners. There are millions of examples everyday of insights large and small: carpenters have them, musicians do, too, so do teachers, lawyers, housekeepers, scientists, and children. We have all experienced an "Aha!" moment, when the answer to our challenges seems to drop out of thin air.

What's amazing about these "Aha!" moments is that the answers they produce are simple, elegant, and always accurate. We immediately know the solution is correct, and so does everyone around us. That's because insights "leapfrog" conventional thinking — they represent a superior form of problem solving.

The trick is to have more of them. Insightful problem solving is one of the brain's secret reactions to complexity. Now what we must do is to help the brain function as optimally as possible to meet today's highly complex problems with a fighting chance. And when I say "we" I'm not just talking about you and me. I am talking about leaders and experts in Washington, D.C., at the United Nations, at the highest levels of nonprofits and large corporations — anywhere gridlock has begun to show itself and beliefs have begun to overshadow rational decision making.

Brain fitness is one tool we have that has now been demonstrated to prepare the brain to load content and solve problems much more easily. Practices such as those created by neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich for Posit Science should be a mandatory part of our daily health regimen. In addition to brain fitness, there are other ways to tune up the human brain. For example, simply walking on uneven surfaces causes so many areas of the brain to fire at the same time that it is one of the best cognitive warm up exercises known. The reason we were not able to teach robots to walk for such a long time — and eventually gave up and put them all on wheels — is that it takes so much horsepower to remain upright on uneven surfaces while in motion that no amount of computational power we could give a robot could prevent it from toppling over. This makes perfect sense when we look back over the history of the human organism and recognize that a third of our brains (the frontal cortex) is the direct result of becoming bipedal. No wonder our brains perform better when we walk!

There are dozens of ways to keep the human brain fit, ready to tackle the exploding complexity of our circumstances. Sadly, most of this research is locked in the back laboratories of universities. There is currently very little effort being made to give these cognitive tools to the man on the street, to leaders, and to experts, who need all the help they can get to tackle the mounting complexity of our problems. Perhaps the time has come to designate an organization whose mission is to explore "inner space" in the same way we once appointed NASA to increase our understanding of "outer space."

In the end, we have three powerful weapons against a recurring cognitive threshold. First we can mitigate to buy time using models for high failure rate. Second, we must adopt the tools now proven by neuroscientists to enable the human brain to solve complex problems more effectively. And finally, we must acknowledge that at any point in time the human organism is a "work in progress" and there are inherited limitations to the kinds of problems we can solve. As a result, the important question for the survival of all of humanity is how do we get around those limitations, not who is right and who is wrong. Why waste time pointing fingers, when everyone is hampered by the same limitations, the same biological challenges?

Up to this point we have been examining the "big picture" from a historical point of view. We have looked at the rise and fall of great civilizations in terms of a biological imperative caused by the slow rate at which the human brain can evolve and the rapid rate at which complexity accelerates. This discrepancy eventually causes the human brain to begin lagging behind. When this occurs we approach a cognitive impasse where navigating even everyday life situations begins to feel difficult.

Take me for example.

Yesterday I was invited to speak to a class at Stanford University. The person who invited me provided excellent directions so I was able to quickly locate the parking lot where I was instructed to leave my car.

But from there things went downhill fast.

I needed to locate "room 335 in the Y2E2 building next to the parking lot." So I parked my car and began walking around. It had to be nearby. I walked and walked. No Y2E2. Not anywhere. I checked every building, even those remotely near the parking lot — no Y2E2. Finally, I stopped a fellow who looked like he taught at Stanford — he pointed to the building my car was facing. "Right there," he smiled. As I walked to the entrance of the building I looked for Y2E2, but this is what I found instead: Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building. Two Ys and two Es, ergo Y2E2.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but that wasn't obvious or intuitive to me as I was traipsing around the Stanford campus in 90 degree weather with a bag of books and a computer. But it was an excellent example of what I mean about complexity in our daily lives — how unaware I am that the struggle to keep up with little things like a nickname for a building is wearing me down.

In yesterday's blog I described how short-term mitigation strategies can be used to temporarily bridge the gap between the brain and complexity. For example, high-failure-rate models are effectively used by venture capitalists when winners cannot be separated from losers no matter how much due diligence is performed. When the problems we must solve become too complex and we become unable to separate the solutions that will work from those that will not, then, like venture capitalists, we must deploy many solutions in tandem, while making an accommodation for high rates of failure and therefore waste.

Mitigations, such as models for high failure rates, buy us time, but they should not be confused with a permanent cure. Unfortunately, very often today they are. For example in California, where I live, we have been struggling with drought conditions for several decades and now believe that conservation measures alone will see us through. Last year I watched my yard turn brown as my water bill quadrupled — it was a sobering experience. When I attend water board meetings and try to explain that conservation is not a permanent solution because one day, like the Mayans, we will not be able to conserve less than zero when the rains stop, experts scoff and tell me to go home and buy drought tolerant plants.

Really?

Scientists, from Steven Chu, now the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, to the leaders of virtually every international climate organization, agree that a catastrophic drought in the western United States is inevitable. It has happened before and it will happen again. Yet we continue to delude ourselves that if we take shorter showers and don't ask for fresh towels at hotels we have licked the problem.

By the same token, mitigating by using models for high failure rates is also a temporary solution. If the brain is susceptible to lagging behind accelerating complexity, then the only permanent solution is to improve our ability to load content so we can manage highly chaotic, dynamic problems.

Today's neuroscientists are on the cusp of understanding how the human brain responds to complexity that exceeds the left and right brain problem-solving methods we have evolved over many millions of years. Recently, they have discovered a third problem-solving method ideally matched to problems which, at first blush, may feel too complicated to solve. In rare circumstances, a process called "insight" takes over. A small part of the human brain called the aSTG "lights up like a Christmas tree" approximately 300 milliseconds before we use insight to cut through billions of possibilities and make a novel connection. Out of this new connection comes an accurate, elegant, and brilliant solution. These insights arrive suddenly and without warning. Think of Archimedes watching water spilling over the sides of his bathtub and shouting "Eureka!" or Newton sitting under an apple tree when an apple hit him on the head. Both were examples of spontaneous "insight" at work.

Ideally we would cultivate insight-on-demand to navigate the complex world we now face. But we don't know enough about this revolutionary form of problem-solving, used so infrequently by the brain today to be able to induce it. The truth is we know very little about insight other than that it is a naturally occurring process which has been observed in ALL human beings. We know insight is a biological capability all humans possess. But why do we use it so infrequently? And if our ability to survive is now dependent on our ability to navigate complexity, why aren't our brains adapting by utilizing insight more and more frequently?

According to Dr. Michael Merzenich, a leading neuroscientist at UCSF Medical Center, we can facilitate the brain's ability to function better by preparing the brain to learn and to solve problems, similar to the way that marathon runners stretch and warm up before a race. Merzenich has produced a suite of brain fitness tools specially designed to make loading and retaining content easier and problem solving more efficient. The empirical evidence Merzenich has amassed proving that these tools work is so overwhelming it makes me wonder why everyone in Washington, D.C., isn't required to start the day out with 20 minutes of brain fitness before tackling the world's most difficult problems.

More on brain fitness

Two days ago we began a new conversation.

On the first day we looked at the rise and fall of advanced civilizations as a biological imperative. Instead of war powers, rampant viruses, climate change, or incompetent leadership being the cause of collapse, we began to view it as the result of a discrepancy between the rapid rate at which complexity is discovered and manufactured and the slow rate at which the human brain can evolve new features to address complex problems. Once the complexity of our circumstances exceeds the cognitive capabilities we have evolved at any point in time, we simply can go no further. Governments, experts, and leaders become gridlocked. Then, following gridlock, we begin substituting unproven beliefs for facts in a desperate attempt to keep progress moving forward. Public policy becomes dominated by irrational beliefs as problems grow worse. Whether we examine the Mayan's ultimate response to drought (they abandoned building reservoirs and turned exclusively to human sacrifice to solve their problems) or the United State's invasion of Iraq (also based on unproven beliefs) the pattern is the same. When complexity makes facts too difficult to obtain or understand, we have no other choice but to act on our beliefs. And that includes the President of the United States of America.

To this point it has been important to understand the biological reasons for why we now struggle in Washington, D.C., in the boardrooms of GM, AIG, and Goldman Sachs, at the United Nations — everywhere where insurmountable complexity has taken hold.

But the time has come to dig our way out. And thankfully, modern man has two remedies that earlier civilizations did not have.

The first is mitigation. When the brain hits a cognitive limit we become unable to separate solutions that will work from those that will not. In an urgent situation like the Gulf oil spill, the consequences of becoming an "incompetent picker" were devastating. First we put a concrete box over the hole, and three weeks later, as millions of gallons of oil continued to spew into the Gulf, we discovered the first solution we picked didn't work. As a second option we began trying to drill though one of the pipes from the side to siphon off the pressure and oil. Another three weeks passed before we realized that wasn't going to work either. But in this situation we were lucky. Solution number three cured the problem. But what if it had been the eight or ninth solution we tried, four years later? Eventually, this will be our situation. As complexity causes the number of wrong alternatives to exponentially exceed the number of correct ones, even smart people become incompetent.

But models for high failure rates allow us to pursue multiple solutions at the same time while making an allowance for the majority of them to fail. No problem. The solutions that work stop the problem dead in its tracks. In the case of the Gulf oil spill this would have meant that, rather than implementing ONE solution at a time in sequential order, we would have dropped the concrete box on top of the hole, drilled the pipe from the side and deployed "static kill" all in tandem right from day one. Two solutions would have eventually failed, but the "static kill" would have stopped one of the greatest manmade ecological disasters within a matter of days instead of months.

So the first step is to mitigate in a smarter way.

But in a world where efficiency is the Holy Grail how prepared are we to have leaders waste 80 cents of every dollar to stop a calamity? It wouldn't take long for the citizenry to label the waste as incompetence, even though replacing one leader with another would make no substantial difference whatsoever. From an evolutionary perspective all of our brains have the same limitations. So regardless of who is making the decision, the number of wrong choices continues to escalate relative to the number of right ones. The odds are stacked against every leader.

At the ground level this means it doesn't matter whether we put a Tea Party candidate or a left wing radical in the White House, the result will be the same. Unless we begin to look at our impasse as a biological obstacle that all civilizations since the beginning of time have encountered, we cannot progress.

We are the first civilization to come face to face with this pattern and the first to have proven mitigation models to turn to, so there has never been more cause for hope.

But hope does not come without a price. We will have to accept a higher threshold of waste in order to get to the cure. Not everything we try will work — in fact most things won't. And if that's the case, how will we pay for all the wasted programs when we are already sinking in debt?

Ahhhhh, but isn't debt just another complex problem like a spill in the Gulf or pandemic virus or climate change? Can't we attack debt using the same high failure rate models — launch many solutions at the same time?

Perhaps the time has come to accept the evolutionary limitations of the human organism itself and to mitigate in a way that will allow the brain to catch up to complexity. And if we do, what then? Then we must use that time to arm our brains with tools which allow us to manage massive amount of content and intricacy with as much ease as Archimedes sitting in a bathtub and watching the water spill over the edge.

But that's a topic for tomorrow...

In yesterday's blog I explained how, over 151 years ago, Charles Darwin may have unknowingly uncovered the reasons why advanced civilizations progress rapidly for a brief period of time, suddenly encounter gridlock, and then collapse.

The recurring pattern of the ascension and collapse of great societies may be nothing more than the inevitable outcome of two incompatible clocks: the slow clock of evolution — which dictates how fast the human brain can develop new capabilities — and the rapid rate at which we make new discoveries, produce new data, invent new technologies, procedures, institutions, and so on. At any point in time the human organism is a "work in progress" and we cannot advance further than the biological spacesuit that we are trapped in will allow: we cannot run a mile in 10 seconds, we cannot flap our arms and fly, and we cannot lift 10,000 pounds no matter how much we may want to.

So it follows that the reason leaders, experts, and governments eventually become gridlocked (we witness the same symptoms occurring everywhere: every country, every large corporation, every individual) is because the complexity of the problems that must be solved begin to exceed the capabilities that our brains have evolved to this point. If this is true, then it doesn't matter of you put your faith in a Republican or a Democrat, a Washington insider or outsider, a man or a woman, a staunch Catholic or a radical Muslim, the result will always be the same because each of their cognitive capabilities — from a strictly biological standpoint — are virtually the same. If the central problem is that we have hit some "limit" to our cognitive abilities and this is now preventing all of us from solving our most complex problems — problems such as climate change, mounting debt, escalating pandemic viruses, autism, obesity, pharmaceutical drug addiction, and the rapid depletion of the earth's resources — then the key to reigniting progress is to examine how the brain reacts once it approaches a stalemate.

We have now discovered that when facts are not available, or become too complicated to get to the bottom of (think ballot measures, arguments over climate change, where to invest your retirement portfolio, the complicated side effects of taking multiple pharmaceuticals), we begin adopting unproven beliefs, one after another. We begin to become confused about what are proven facts and what are beliefs and opinions.

Okay, that's a lot to think about. How about a concrete example of this phenomenon:

Whether you were in favor of the Iraq war or not, you must admit that the empirical evidence the United States had for the existence of weapons of mass destruction was thin. The reason I say thin is because, in the end, there were no weapons. So, working backwards, there could be no concrete evidence about something that didn't exist.

But that's hindsight for you. So just for a moment, let's look at what evidence the U.S. actually did have in its possession prior to the war (now confirmed by any number of primary sources, from Colin Powell to Hans Blix): the decision to invade Iraq boiled down to a few fuzzy satellite photographs waved in front of the United Nations, and one intelligence operative on the ground in Iraq whose reports could not be confirmed. That is pretty much it in a nutshell.

Looking back, that hardly seems like the kind of evidence that warrants one nation marching into another.

But try to remember the climate of that time. The aftershock of 9/11 was still reverberating in every home in America and we were not only poised to respond, we needed to respond. We were no more rational than the Mayans who needed to believe that human sacrifice would make the rains return. In our case, we believed that if we eliminated Saddam Hussein, the world would become safe again and we could return to life as we knew it.

Against this backdrop, American leaders were primed to substitute beliefs for proven empirical facts, so they voted almost unanimously, on very little evidence, to go to war. From both a historical and hysterical perspective this can be shown to be a normal human reaction when there are no facts, or when facts are too difficult to discern.

But the Iraq war is just one example. Take any dangerous problem we face today and ask yourself: why has our response to that problem become increasingly irrational?

The answer is that we have hit an evolutionary cognitive limit and this has caused public policy to be based on beliefs rather than rational thinking.

If the culprit is the amount of complexity the human brain has evolved to manage to this point, then the answer to all of our unresolved threats lies in our ability to (a) effectively mitigate in order to buy time, and (b) catch up the brain to complexity.

How do we do that? How can civilization begin to move past the cognitive threshold?

Stay

For the first time in publishing history, thought leaders from around the world — familiar names such as Trudie Styler, Richard Branson, Edward O. Wilson, Senator Bill Bradley, Tina Brown, Temple Grandin, Wallace J. Nichols, and others — have stepped forward to endorse the release of a landmark new book by contributing multiple forewords. (The forewords — dubbed e-forewords because they will be published electronically — can be found here.) I am pleased to celebrate the historic debut of The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction by blogging for Powells.com this week.

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What if I told you that the most dangerous problems we face today — mounting debt, terrorism, the rapid depletion of the earth's resources, climate change, escalating autism, depression, cancers, and pandemic viruses — were not separate problems? What if I said that ancient civilizations encountered similar challenges, grew increasingly gridlocked, then also began passing their greatest threats from one generation to another as conditions worsened? And what if I told you that we now understand why this pattern occurs again and again and have the ability to stop it?

Would you listen?

No, I'm not talking about the battle between good and evil for your soul. Or the greed of a few at the expense of many. Or prophecies as foretold by the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus and Indian folklore. Our difficulties don't stem from corruption, politics, or religious zealots on the other side of the world. And surprisingly, they aren't a matter of money, oil, or power.

None of the above.

The problems we have not been able to solve for multiple generations all share a single, common denominator: they are all complex. That's right. They are multi-pronged, dynamic problems which are not only difficult to comprehend, but they have become almost impossible to get our arms around. Take global warming for example. The truth is we can't even agree on whether it's a problem or not. We may have mountains of studies and facts at our fingertips (thanks to the Internet) — but these facts often contradict each other, and many assertions are based on sloppy science. A person would need a leave of absence and a Ph.D. to get to the bottom of the issue — let alone come up with a solution.

So the central issue we must now face is this: what happens when the complexity of the problems we need to solve exceed the cognitive capabilities we have evolved to this point?

It occurred to me that over 151 years ago, when Charles Darwin discovered the slow pace of evolution, he also inadvertently uncovered the reasons why human societies progress rapidly for a brief period of time, then come to a standstill and collapse: civilizations cannot progress further than evolution will allow.

What do I mean when I say "evolution will allow"? I simply mean that at any point in time the human organism is a work in progress. If we dropped a Neanderthal into Times Square today, he would have a difficult time performing even the simplest of tasks. By the same token, if a time machine transported us millions of years into the future we would look like Neanderthals. That's because, at any point in time there is a biological limit to what we are capable of.

Sounds logical.

Then it follows that once we begin making new discoveries and inventing new technologies and procedures in picoseconds, the human brain — which requires million of years to develop new capabilities — can't help but fall behind. The two clocks are incompatible, so it is inevitable that a gap will occur.

The first sign of that gap is gridlock. We become unable to solve our greatest threats. Leaders and experts fumble while our problems exponentially grow in magnitude and peril.

The second sign? We begin accepting unproven beliefs in lieu of facts. As complexity makes facts impossible to discern, we have a track record of simply substituting irrational beliefs. In the case of the Mayans, as drought conditions worsened they abandoned rational solutions such as building reservoirs and underground cisterns and began relying on sacrifice to make the rains return — even to the point of sacrificing "unspoiled" newborn infants.

In The Watchman's Rattle I show how every civilization eventually hits a cognitive threshold beyond which they cannot advance. When this occurs they become gridlocked and irrational beliefs take over public policy.

But I will also quickly point out that we have weapons against encroaching complexity which ancient civilizations did not: effective ways of mitigating highly complex problems and, more importantly, breakthroughs in modern neuroscience which pave the way for the brain to catch up.

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