Hard to Be Human: Overcoming Our Five Cognitive Design Flaws

by Ted Cadsby

Powerful strategies to combat the design flaws of the human brain that make life in the twenty-first century unreasonably difficult.

If other animals could study us the way we study them, they would be puzzled by our unique ability to inflict misery on ourselves. We expend a lot of energy replaying past anguish, anticipating future distress, and stewing in self-righteous anger. Other animals would call us out for being oddly paradoxical creatures who long to be happy but who are the source of their own suffering, We worry about things we have no control over. We complain about not being understood while casting a critical eye on others. We stubbornly defend our beliefs despite contradictory evidence. Complicating all of this is our struggle to adapt to a complex world that we created. who struggle to adapt to a confusing world that we ourselves created.

In our defence, we haven’t yet mastered our neuron-packed brains, whose incredible complexity evolved over millennia in a very different world than today’s. The result of this evolutionary journey? Five design features that often morph into design flaws in need of fixing.

Hard to Be Human corrals the best insights from psychology, neuroscience, physics, and philosophy to reveal powerful strategies for the five big battles we each face in the war with our misguided, misbehaving selves. Tapping into deeply personal stories to ground the concepts in real life, Cadsby reveals how we can overcome our design flaws to be smarter, happier, and better adapted to the complexities of life in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 9, 2021

About the author

TED CADSBY, MBA, CFA, ICD.D is a corporate director, consultant, speaker and bestselling author who has been extensively interviewed by the national media. Ted has held several prominent positions in the financial sector, including executive vice president of Retail Distribution at CIBC where he led a team of 18,000 employees domestically and internationally. Prior, he was president and CEO of CIBC Securities Inc., chairman of CIBC Trust Corp., and chairman of CIBC Private Investment Counsel Inc.

Reviews

[David Wineberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The human brain is not a single organ. Instead of growing, it has added modules to itself. The latest module, the prefrontal cortex, is the large double segment in front, right over the eyes. This is where we store short term memory, empathy and other feelings, and do our evaluating. We evaluate ourselves constantly, worrying about mistakes, optimization, life plans, self-image, decisions, opinions and so much more – in fact - everything. It is different than the older areas, and is called system 2 (as popularized by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow). Unfortunately, those older areas, called system 1, consider themselves more important. System 1 withholds data from system 2, allow it into the processes only after it has made its decisions on how to react, and is in general constantly at war with system 2, which simply has very different values.

System 1 is in charge of instant evaluation: friend or enemy, fight or flight, tense up or carry on, immediate danger or innocent movement, inflammation or normal operation, and so on. It processes eleven million bits of data every second, from inside the body to as far as the eyes can see and the senses feel. System 1 gathers and controls all the inputs, while system 2 ponders and criticizes. According to David Wenger, “We may feel that we are freely choosing, but subconscious processing is doing the choosing for us and just ‘letting us know’ what it has decided.”

In Hard To Be Human, Ted Cadsby seeks to bridge the no man’s land between system 1 and system 2. If that is possible, it can mean calmer, saner lives, more life satisfaction, less worry and much less stress.

There two parts to the book, much like system 1 and system 2 in fact. The first part, by far the more impactful and impressive, is physiological science. Cadsby describes brain module functions, how humans evolved, the challenges they faced in different eras, and their advantages (thanks to their brains and bipedalism). The paradox is that this huge advantage of being able to analyze has also caused no end of anguish that “lesser” animals never experience. They just take life one day at a time.

Not us. We worry about how we look, how far behind we are in our life plans, how to deal with spouses and children and debt, how the climate is changing, how vaccines can kill us, how elections have been stolen, how that wide receiver could possibly have dropped that ball…it is endless.

We overreact. We see signal where there is only noise, getting upset over everything and nothing. We reduce anything and everything to simplicity, warranted or not. We are automatic reductionists, oversimplifying and thereby getting it wrong. “To know is to simplify;” Cadsby says those are the most important five words in the book.

In addition, humans are pattern seekers. System 1 learned to rely on previous experience, and today we try to find repeating patterns everywhere, in everything. Even when there are none, we assign them patterns. And symmetry. We love symmetry. This helps us make bad moves, register false alarms, second guess ourselves - and that too is endless.

When we add to this stew the instant decisions designed to keep us alive in savannas with vicious predators and us all but unarmed, we can take wrong turns, make self-destructive moves, stress about what we should really do, why we didn’t do it, what we should do next time, and what happens if anyone else finds out what we did. That’s the ongoing war. We cannot turn off system 1 (the bully, Cadsby call it), and we sure don’t want to rely entirely on system 2.

So while humans are the only ones that can think about what they think, evaluate the past and project the future, it drives them crazy, sometimes literally. We need to be certain; we need the truth. But truth is elusive, Cadsby says, because there is always more information we don’t have. No matter how much data we analyze, there is always more we have not considered. And as life gets more complicated, the amount of data surrounding almost anything is far greater than it was for hunter-gatherers. The kind of certainty we insist on does not exist, he says.

That does not stop system 2 from making all kinds of decisions. It makes decisions out of ignorance all the time. Charles Darwin pointed out that “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Neuroscientist Robert Burton said “’I am sure’ is mental sensation, not testable conclusion.” To err might be human, but the Dunning-Kruger Effect says the less we know, the more certain we are.

Unhappiness is a far more frequent occupier of our minds than happiness is. We are affected far more by unhappiness than happiness. A loss hurts us far more than a gain pleases us. Pain affects us far more than pleasure. Cadsby puts it this way: “Tortured by our own minds like no other animal, we expend a lot of mental energy reliving past anguish, anticipating future distress, stewing in self-righteous anger, and reacting to triggers that are products of our overactive imaginations.” He cites Therapist Russell Harris: “We can have anger about our anxiety, anxiety about our anger, depression about our depression or guilt about our guilt.” These are the side effects of operating a human brain. We are our own roadkill.

All that is a description of the problem. And an excellent, gripping description it is, making biology, paleontology and psychology most accessible. It might be sufficient just knowing this is how the brain works to overcome the flaws and push back.

Now about his solutions…

This thinking about thinking and about who we are is called metacognition, and it is also the key to toning down the battles. It can, Cadsby says, allow us to hack our emotions and biases. We do it by accessing the “space between” the systems. This is the place where system 2 obtains data from system 1 and where system 1 holds off on that data until it has made its own decisions.

Cadsby has found several ways to access that space, he says. The one that is always available and most reliable is stopping whatever you are doing, and taking a deeper breath, exhaling on purpose instead of automatically, and focusing on it. It’s like pushing in the clutch and disengaging from the engine. You’re suddenly in neutral. Drawing the brain away from its obsessive evaluations and constant reevaluations can break the cycle and allow you to see what is important. Usually, he says, it is not what you have been thinking about. Because our minds wander 47% of the time, usually making us very unhappy. All the tiny annoyances of daily life get magnified by an available system 2, causing anger, outbursts, overreactions and just plain stupidity.

Breaking up the self-criticism cycle is the key to less stress. Observing how destructive that cycle is can help tame it. Putting those criticisms in perspective can show how low their priority should really be. Regaining control from a system 2 gone wild can make all the difference in the world.

It is also possible to override system 1. You can decide that the black triangle in the water is not a shark after all, and head on in. But most people, though fully capable of thinking about thinking, just let it go, The decision was made for them and that’s it. They don’t know they have given up control to battling brain modules.

Cadsby now identifies five “cognitive design flaws” in our brains, and analyzes them in part two. They are:
Greedy reductionism
Addiction to certainty
Holding ourselves emotional hostage
Competing with ourselves
Misdirecting the need for meaning
These five can be seen to get more and more new agey and less scientific as you go down the list. And so the proposed solutions confirm.

Worse, the fixes to the flaws are all soft philosophy. Cadsby cites endless philosophers and their differing evaluations of life, meaningfulness, thought processes and the like. Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Frankl, Schopenhauer, Pinker, Camus, Sartre, Montaigne, Voltaire, Freud, Jung, Russell, Dennett – they’re all here with their two cents. None of them knew definitively what they were talking about at the time they said it, but being writers, their words never go away. Their words remain attached to discussions of those subjects, if only because they came from famous philosophers.

The value of the second part of the book was nil for me. After all that science, mush. It is very much like those brains systems: rapid action vs endless recriminations. Other readers will find quotes they agree with, reassurances, affirmation and validation for what they’ve been thinking. It’s just a different book when it comes to fixes for the flaws. I was led (or led myself) to expect something more powerful and definitive from part two.

There is way too much Buddhism in the second part. Cadsby even gets himself into an imagined argument with Gautama Buddha, admitting beforehand this is extraordinarily arrogant of him. But it’s his book. It’s just no longer science.

And it gets jargony: “The feeling of meaningfulness is a positive state of well-being that arises when we are deeply absorbed in the activities of our lives. It is a feeling of engagement, engrossment, fulfillment, and, at its peak, self-realization.” Or: “One question to ask when you’re feeling conflicted: Am I giving Observing Self enough space to prioritize Best Self?”

Nonetheless, the impression you get reading Hard To Be Human is total sincerity. First of all, Cadsby is not a neuroscientist or a psychiatrist. He was a banker, a self-admitted tactless one with obsessive-compulsive tendencies that it pains him to admit to. His long search for meaning in life began at 14 when he realized studying for a French exam was not just a total waste of time, but so was his whole life. Why wasn’t everyone running in the streets screaming over this discovery as they made it?

The result, several decades later, is an abundance of evidence in the form of quotes, books, ideas and theories he has internalized. He appears totally at ease with all of it and has mastered what there is to master. He picks what he wants from everyone, right back to Gautama Buddha. It makes the book totally engaging as well as an easy read. Towards the end he reveals the real secret to it all: “Life itself is neither meaningful nor meaningless – it just is.”

David Wineberg


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[Paul Sutter]

Books are meant to challenge us and stimulate us mentally. There are some books that are light and breezy reads, that do not get brain cells churning. You certainly cannot make that statement about HARD TO BE HUMAN (Overcoming Our 5 Cognitive Design Flaws) by Ted Cadsby. It is the thinking man’s book, where we learn how we internalize many flaws within out system, and get on the road to self-actualization and realization of these flaws.
Cadsby has had a most interesting career in the world of business and in the literary world. He uses that knowledge and expertise, to take us on a tour of the human brain, probing deep with the psyche to seek solutions and answers. Call it a deep dive into the brain, collecting data about the five flaws that can derail success and offer negative emotions that are far from conducive to our well-being.
He cites the five flaws as: We’re greedy reductionists, we’re addicted to certainty, we hold ourselves emotionally hostage, we compete with ourselves, and we misdirect our need for meaning. He systematically goes through the fixes to the flaws, that are not confounding as one might imagine. People often look too hard for answers and solutions to the point they may be staring the problem in the face, yet they are blinded by their own looking too hard for solutions.
Cadsby explains this well, and speaks of “emotional hostage-taking” This is characterized he adds by “self- immersion where we are narrowly and intensely absorbed by inner turmoil.”
There are some simpler fixes than we realize, such as taking deep breaths. If there are strong negative reactions one is feeling, even deeper breaths can work wonders for the body and helps in self-distancing oneself from the dilemma.
The author also looks at some of the world’s most notable thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Stephen Pinker, and others. Their attitudes and philosophies also contribute to internal well-being and struggles that overwhelm us. It is hard not to find something of value in HARD TO BE HUMAN, where taking the time to read this timely work, will raise our contentment level during these troubled times.

[Ariel Hudnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

As humans, it often feels like we are eager to oversimplify, assert snap judgements as fact, and assign profound meaning to everything we do. These tendencies do enough harm to our own psyches: diminishing our self-esteem, ramping up anxiety and depression, and opening pathways to critical miscommunications with others. But they also have broader effects—confirmation bias, stereotypes, emotional hostage taking—these behaviors can also drive deep wedges in our relationships with each other and obviously society as a whole.

Ted Cadsby's Hard to Be Human is a breath of fresh air amidst the miasma. He argues that homo sapiens evolved with five unique cognitive features that quickly became flaws as our society and communities became more complex. These flaws also have fixes—through small perspective shifts and practice—to kick our brains out of their tendency to perform in reactive and automatic states to reclaim our logical, practical and experiential thought processes in most situations.

This is a very well-written and researched book, weaving philosophy, psychology and cognitive behaviorial therapy together with personal and historical anecdotes. Elegant graphics illustrate the more complex themes, allowing the reader to process the ideas behind the words with ease.

What really makes this book so valuable (especially in a time where increased pressure and stress limit the time we have to truly think) is not just the clear way each aspect of the book is laid out, but the specific, achievable tools Cadsby shares to change habits, and ultimately, become a better human.

A book I found right when I needed it. Highly recommended.

[Jennifer Turliuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought-provoking; inside look at how imperfectly we operate as human beings without even knowing it; very interesting personal stories from author's life used in most chapters that really brought the main points home; a lot of research and footnotes - all claims are backed up with references and science; something for every reader, even if some parts don't resonate as much as others; particularly loved the chapters on our emotions and how we can understand and manage them more effectively - made you think about your own emotional life in a different way. I wish the author had included even more personal anecdotes since they really added colour to the book and the ones he included were powerful in different ways. Would have been 5 stars with more personal stories but highly recommended if you're into psychology, self-help, but looking for something a bit more sophisticated and based on the newest leading edge research.

[Rachel Spence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to Be Human is a fascinating look at what makes us uniquely human and how we can transform that uniqueness into something beneficial. The book highlights five design features of the human brain that often manifest themselves as flaws, such as our misguided search for meaning, and delves into how those flaws can be "fixed," forever altering how we view our experiences and choices. The author also includes entertaining and illuminating anecdotes to showcase these flaws.

Highly researched and accessible to a variety of readers, Hard to Be Human offers essential insight for understanding how to live a happier, adaptable life in the twenty-first century.

[Donald Bastian]

I predict this book will take its place alongside Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. A creative blend of psychology, philosophy, and science, it explores how we have evolved cognitively to subvert how we interact with other humans, with nature, and with society, through faulty thinking, faulty decision making, and even a faulty understanding of our own need for meaning. Best of all, the book gives clear solutions through its skilful combination of exposition and practical advice. An excellent complement to his last book Closing the Mind Gap.