Welcome to the eleventh edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

Your brain is shrinking, and so is mine.

In fact, current human brains are actually smaller than the brains of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But how?

There has been a reduction in the overall brain size and volume of humans over the last 100,000 years, according to newer research out of the journal Brain & Cognition.

Now, that probably sounds a bit scary, or like a clear justification for why the entire world seems to be going crazy, but it doesn’t mean what you might think. To understand this better, let’s look back first.

Over 2 million years ago, various members of the genus Homo coexisted, but in the evolutionary spirit of survival, one aspect was becoming the most important factor of all: brain size.

No matter the species, those who were born with larger brains continued to live longer and pass on their genes. This is because bigger brains allowed for better cognition, adaptability, innovation, and ability to function in larger social groups.

As modern humans came onto the scene 300,000 years ago, we continued to grow larger brains for 200,000 more years, before things began to change.

Life is indeed truly all about trade-offs; we can’t escape them. And the trade-off for having larger brains means we spend more energy using them and lose more energy trying to keep them cool. Think of it like a powerful computer; you need more power to run it, and more fans to cool it from the extra heat it generates.

Our brains work exactly like this. Around 100,000 years ago, our brains hit a size-related breaking point, where they were using up more calories than our ancestors could find daily, and creating more heat as a byproduct.

As a result of this, evolution began to force our brains to become more efficient, to produce the same (or more) but with less, and it did so through a process known as cognitive offloading.

Cognitive offloading is a fancy way of saying that our brains began to externalize some of their storage and processing power, like when you load files onto a USB or external hard drive. By default, the brain is always trying to reduce the energy spent on specific tasks, but what is really cool about it is the way humans achieve this.

The main method for offloading this brain power was the creation of culture, language, and tools. As our ancestors improved at social skills and group dynamics, we were able to offload key information that increased survival of the entire group.

Language kept groups cohesive; culture transmitted crucial knowledge widely; tools reduced the need for everyone to master every difficult task.

This fascinating offloading of our cognitive storage and processing abilities proved to be one of the most important factors in the survival and proliferation of our species. One could also argue we are going through an even more intensive version of this now, with the creation of the internet, smartphones, and AI in the last 2-3 decades.

Regardless, one universal fact remains true: If you don’t use it, you lose it.

(Unless you develop external systems to retain the information in a user-friendly, scalable way)

In the modern era where humans can’t agree on almost anything, there is surely one thing we can all agree on: few of us like our current leaders, politically or professionally.

For most of human history, power structures have rewarded leaders with more hyper-masculine qualities, like dominance, arrogance, and assertiveness. However, this has little to do with the preferences of those being led.

Researchers at NYU decided to look more into what humans’ preferred leadership style is, comparing three key dimensions: competence, assertiveness, and communality.

Researchers conducted two studies that piggybacked on each other, using over 1,300 participants. In the first, participants were given a hypothetical budget, and they were required to spend that budget on different leadership traits, with the budget getting progressively smaller with each round.

On average, participants spent two-thirds of their initial budget on competency traits, and these allocations stayed the same whether the leader was expected to be male or female. This shows how competence is a primary requirement in leadership.

But beyond competence, what else did the participants rate the most highly?

Participants consistently balanced their preference for assertiveness with communality. Put more simply, they valued warmth and cooperation just as much, if not more, as they did assertiveness. This shows how much people valued both the communal and driven elements of a leader.

However, when tasked with what traits they rejected, participants strongly avoided more traditional toxically masculine qualities, like arrogance, controlling behavior, and domineering.

The conclusion here is pretty clear: People today prefer leaders who are competent, communal, and mildly assertive, regardless of gender, while rejecting leaders overly focused on control and domination.

Last week, we talked about one of the most difficult methods of modern rejection: ghosting.

This week, let’s dive deeper into rejection from a psychological and evolutionary perspective.

How do people use acceptance and rejection experiences to guide future social connections?

Researcher Begüm Babür, a PhD in social psychology at USC, and her colleagues set out to understand more about rejection and how it functions from an evolutionary perspective, looking beyond it simply being a cause of pain.

While we live in an increasingly individualized world, humans are inherently social, group-oriented creatures, and our brains’ need for this social acceptance is still deeply wired in all of us.

One of the most interesting aspects of this research is the fact that humans’ need for social belonging and acceptance is an evolutionary response.

Put simply, over time as homo sapiens evolved, social rejection became a threat to survival through losing access to protection, resources, and cooperation. This is what made social connection and belonging a fundamental human need.

Researchers created a dynamic experiment to study how people learn from repeated social feedback, using a mixture of behavioral tests, brain imaging, and computational modeling.

The experiment’s goal was to mirror the structure of real social situations, all while the participants were undergoing brain scans.

Pain is our brain’s default learning mechanism, it’s the reason we have a ‘negativity bias’, where painful events are remembered 2-5x more than positive ones.

What this new research shows is that rejection isn’t just about pain and its impact on our memory, but also how rejection is used as a learning mechanism, forcing us to focus quickly on who is worth approaching, trusting, or letting go of.

Thanks for reading the eleventh edition!

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