The Runaway Species

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David Eagleman. The Runaway Species

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The Runaway Species

How Human Creativity Remakes the World

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Brains seek a balance between exploiting previously-learned knowledge and exploring new possibilities. This is always a tricky trade-off.4 Say you’re deciding which restaurant to go to for lunch. Do you stick with your traditional favorite or try something new? If you go for your familiar haunt, you’re exploiting knowledge you’ve gained from past experience. If you jump into the culinary abyss, you’re exploring untried options.

Across the animal kingdom, creatures set their trade-off point somewhere in the middle. If you learn through experience that the red rocks have grubs under them while the blue rocks do not, you need to exploit that knowledge. But one day you may find that grubs aren’t there, whether because of drought, fires or other foraging animals. The rules of the world rarely hold constant, and this is why animals need to take what they’ve learned (the red rocks yield grubs) and balance that against attempting new discoveries (I wonder what’s under these blue rocks?). And this is why an animal will spend most of its time looking under the red rocks, but not all of it. It’ll spend some time looking under the blue rocks, even if it has looked there several times in the past, unsuccessfully. It’ll continue to explore. It’ll also spend some time looking under the yellow rocks and in tree trunks and in the river, because one never knows where the next meal is going to come from. Across the animal kingdom, hard-won knowledge is counterbalanced with new pursuits.

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