What are our minds made for?

"But there is a deeper question: What are our minds made for? It looks as if we have the wrong user’s manual . Our minds do not seem made to think and introspect ; if they were, things would be easier for us today, but then we would not be here today and I would not have been here to talk about it—my counterfactual , introspective, and hard-thinking ancestor would have been eaten by a lion while his nonthinking but faster-reacting cousin would have run for cover. Consider that thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy, that our predecessors spent more than a hundred million years as nonthinking mammals and that in the blip in our history during which we have used our brain we have used it on subjects too peripheral to matter. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except , of course, when we think about it ."