Opinion – Suzana Herculano-Houzel: Either this or that

“Either there is rain and there is no sun, or if there is sun and there is no rain”, Cecília Meireles said in the little poem that my mother made me memorize when I was a child. The message stayed with me, and I pass it on to my children: either I keep the money and don’t buy the candy, or I buy the candy and don’t keep the money. Now, after decades of education and with my experience of researching how different brains are made, I find that Either This Or That has a biologically fundamental reason for being: Decisions happen when resources are scarce.

Time and space are two of them. Parallel universes aside (“multiverses” is the hell, Marvel thing taking over the popular imagination), our existence in the world we perceive is limited to one thing in one place at a time: whoever rises in the air doesn’t stay on the ground, who stays on the ground does not rise in the air.

Energy is the other eternally scarce resource for us animals. It is not enough for us to exist immersed in light, air and matter, like plants; we need to act to get the energy to keep acting—and yet every act costs energy. Staying alive requires moving to stand, running to stay put.

And money, of course, is the bargaining chip that turns time into space, work into energy, energy into time. Money could be just as scarce a resource as the time or space or labor or energy that gives rise to it, but different rules of conversion apply according to who makes them. These, too, are decisions: acts of others that dictate whether what happens with our time and effort is This or That.

How and why we make decisions is another five hundred. Animals endowed with a brain capable of representing past and future, like us, have the ability to learn from their own experience and use it to make predictions of possible and probable states, and then act accordingly, in favor of the desired future. . If this ability is actually put into practice, it is another five hundred; history shows that human beings, and Brazilians in particular, are very adept at disregarding what could have been lessons from the past. Yet the fact remains: decisions are made as the brain compares future states and acts in favor of one rather than the other.

And all this for what? For the brain owner’s satisfaction and contentment, that’s what I learned from neuroscience. Sounds bad, but this is the good news. What makes a good decision depends on the brain that decides, which can only think about its own future state, with deep pockets and a large bank account — but it can also include in its desired future the health, education and well-being of others.

It is up to each one of us, owners of a brain and a voter registration card, to choose what we want to bet our scarce resources on. I, unlike Cecília Meireles, already understood perfectly that That is much better than This, at the moment…