How Madness Shaped Humanity

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Watching a lecture by Professor Robert Sapolsky sparked a fascinating thought. He discussed how certain religious predispositions might be linked to specific cognitive traits. This made me wonder: could other mammals also experience similar cognitive variations?

We see hints of this in the animal kingdom. Many pet owners recognize signs of depression or anxiety in their dogs. Captive orcas in sea parks often exhibit severe psychological distress, and even turtles have distinct personalities. My hypothesis is that other animals do experience mental health challenges similar to Homo sapiens. However, in the wild, there is little room for individuals who cannot keep up. Without a social structure to support them, these “crazier” animals are less likely to survive and pass on their genes. Consequently, we primarily observe the most mentally stable wild animals. The natural world may be far more neurodiverse than we realize, but its harshness filters out what we would call “neurodivergence.”

This leads to a more profound question about our own origins. Some thinkers, like Yuval Noah Harari, suggest that humanity’s key differentiator is our unique ability to unite around imagined concepts — gods, nations, or laws. What if this capacity for imagination originated with a “crazy” ancestor?

Imagine a scenario in our deep past. One individual, perhaps like a van Gogh of the Pleistocene, experienced reality differently. They might have insisted they saw spirits of the dead or heard voices from the wind. Unlike in other species, our ancestors had reached a level of resources and compassion that allowed them to care for this individual. The band tolerated, protected, and even mated with them, not out of understanding, but out of empathy.

The descendants of this individual may have inherited a spark of that “crazy” cognition — the capacity for imagination. This gift, we now call delusion or psychosis, became the foundation for art, religion, language, and eventually science. It allowed us to cooperate flexibly in large numbers and become the dominant species on Earth. In a sense, we may all be the descendants of that those “different” minds.

There’s a lesson in this history. Our species flourished when we tolerated the unusual thinkers among us. Their “crazy” ideas might be the seeds of progress. When we have succumbed to intolerance, stifling unique thoughts and persecuting one another, our societies have stagnated or fallen. Our greatest evolutionary advantage may not just be our intelligence, but our inherent kindness and our ability to embrace the strange and the new.