Selective pressures evolved the human brain to its current state.<p>When you’re a relatively small primate with soft surface areas, and easy to piece skin, what survives will depend on cognitive flexibility for successful survival. Resource constraints will also demand efficiency, so survival becomes a balancing act between being energy efficient and cognitively flexible.<p>Human cognitive “ailments” like bipolar disorders, anxiety, autism and schizophrenia etc. are poorly understood because we treat them like some sort of disease. However, consider that these disorders are only categorized as such because of the social dysfunction they create in a relatively new type of social organization. Humans evolved over millennia, but our post-agrarian lifestyles are relatively new.<p>People who have such cognitive differences have a different form of cognitive flexibility, which we don’t properly understand to harness quite yet in our current social contexts. Being cognitively flexible has its advantages, but I wonder if there’s also a connection to increased susceptibility to depression and other forms of neuronal degradation. Sadly, cognitive researchers are entrenched in old ways of thinking, like treating these conditions as “disorders” or diseases.