Did Your Brain Evolve to Be Depressed?
An evolutionary explanation of mental illness
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
I’m fascinated by the field of evolutionary psychology, which you can think of as the eventual landing site of virtually every line of questioning about human behavior that starts with “why.”
Why do we give gifts for holidays and birthdays? Because we’re a social species that is hardwired to express altruism in order to increase our own chances of survival. Why do humans have tribal tendencies that can span everything from sports team affiliations to race? Because our prehistoric ancestors had to make instant judgments between friend and foe in order to survive. Why do we plan fantasy vacations to Hawaii during a pandemic? Because our brains evolved to prioritize future events so that we could appropriately prepare for them and increase our odds of survival.
These are, of course, vast oversimplifications of extremely complicated concepts that have many biological and cultural contributors. But there is a sort of satisfaction and sensibility that comes from the ultimate…
