Your Mind, Your Genes, and the Parts You Don’t See

Your Mind, Your Genes, and the Parts You Don’t See

When you think about your own mind, your thoughts, feelings, motives, it’s tempting to see them as purely “yours.” They feel personal, private, shaped by your experiences. And that’s true, but only partly. To really understand why your mind works the way it does, we need to look much further back than childhood. We need to look into evolutionary time, and into the deep logic of the genes that built you.

Mental Traits as Evolved Traits: The Gene-Centric View

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins reframes how we think about evolution. Instead of seeing evolution as something that happens “for the good of the species” or even “for the good of the individual”, Dawkins focuses on genes as the fundamental units of selection. From this perspective, you are, biologically speaking, a survival vessel for your genes. Not consciously, of course. Genes have no minds, no motives in the human sense. They are instructions that have survived across countless generations because they built organisms capable of reproducing. Meaning, it’s not that you exist for your genes in any moral or teleological sense. It’s that the physical and mental traits that aided your ancestors live long enough to reproduce became more common over time. If a gene variant produced a heart strong enough to pump blood uphill, a fear circuit that kept its carrier from strolling into the abyss, or a quick wit that made them more captivating in courtship, that variant was more likely to be passed on. Over millions of years, this process shaped not only your body but your mind.

You are aware that your physical characteristics, like eye color, bone density, immune responses, are the product of genetic instructions interacting with your environment. The same is true of your mental characteristics. Your capacity for language, your sense of humor, your tendency to worry, your preference for certain social structures, all are partly heritable, partly shaped by experience, and deeply rooted in evolutionary history. From an evolutionary standpoint, mental traits are adaptations when they reliably solved problems our ancestors faced. Take memory: remembering where waterholes were in the dry season was as vital as remembering what fruits are poisonous. Take jealousy: in ancestral environments, mate infidelity could mean losing reproductive opportunities or resources, so emotions evolved to signal threats and mobilize protective behavior. Your mental peculiarities aren’t quirks, but engineered responses, refined through natural selection over millennia. And your mother. 😉

Unconscious Processes as Evolved Algorithms

Freud stated plainly that sex, your libido, drives all your thoughts and behavior, but you are not aware of most of it. He wasn’t thinking about genes, but evolutionary science agrees with his philosophy. Psychoanalysis acknowledges that what fits with the evolutionary insights: your mental life is mainly unconscious and driven by reproductive forces. You are aware only of the tip of the iceberg, and beneath your awareness lies a complex, layered system of mental processes that guide your behavior, shape your well-being, and influence the trajectory of your life. From an evolutionary perspective, these unconscious processes are structured, in part, by the biological pressures that selected for certain patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Your brain is not a blank slate that experience writes on freely; it’s an evolved organ, preloaded with tendencies. Those tendencies are flexible, but they are not infinitely so. When you notice yourself reacting in ways that puzzle you, such as avoiding effort despite wanting to achieve a goal, feeling anxious in certain situations, or repeating patterns of self-sabotage, you are often looking at the downstream effects of mental circuits that evolved to solve problems in a different time and place and for the mighty end goal of procreation. Your “irrational” reactions are perfectly rational in pursuing nature’s purpose of the continuation of life.

Think of unconscious processes as evolved biological algorithms, rules of thumb your brain runs without you noticing. They operate faster and more efficiently than conscious thought and are designed to override it when necessary. If a shadow moves in the grass, you startle before you identify the source. If a social bond is threatened, you might feel an immediate wave of distress, although the relationship is actually harming you. If you fall in love, you might nuke the life you’ve built for decades. These processes are functional, but their original, natural purpose may not align with your subjective agenda, or at least with the current social environment. In a small tribal group, social rejection could be life-threatening; today, it might just mean an awkward email exchange. But the same distress circuitry still fires. But above all, what you want deliberately is not necessarily what your genes make you do. You may want to stay single to focus on your career yet find yourself obsessively drawn to someone because your mating circuitry has switched on. You may want to maintain a peaceful family gathering yet feel an irresistible surge of rivalry toward a sibling when parental approval is at stake. 

The traditional task in psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious happenings conscious. It is essential for your development because you can’t simply will yourself to bypass millions of years of evolved mental architecture. You can, however, progressively make some of your unconscious mental life available to awareness. Awareness changes the parameters of choice. When you can predict a reaction, you have more options in how to respond. Once you are aware of your mental programs, you can work on them so they serve you better. You could think of it as pruning an old tree so it grows in the direction you choose. Much of its growth is strong and life-sustaining, but some branches no longer serve you well or crowd out the light you need. Without awareness, the tree continues to grow as it always has. With awareness, you can decide which branches to keep, which to cut back, and where to guide new growth. If you understand that your mind is the product of both your personal history and a much longer evolutionary history, several things shift:

• You stop pathologizing every difficulty. Many of your so-called “flaws” are actually side effects of functional systems. For example, anxiety isn’t a defect; it’s a sensitivity to potential threat. The issue is calibration, not existence.
• You gain a realistic sense of change. Some tendencies are deeply embedded because they were built into the species over eons. You can work with them, shape them, and find adaptive outlets, but erasing or replacing them entirely is unlikely. And maybe unnecessary.
• You approach self-understanding with more precision. Instead of seeing your unconscious as a mysterious swamp, you can see it as an organized set of functions. That organization has a history, and knowing that history helps you navigate it.
• You connect the personal with the universal. Your unique story matters, but you also carry the universal architecture of the human mind. Psychoanalysis informed by evolution works at both levels: the idiosyncratic and the species-typical.

Evolving Your Mind on Your Own

Gaining awareness is not a single moment of revelation, but an accumulation of observations. In psychoanalysis, you explore your inner life through introspection and observation. Introspection means paying close attention to the movement of your own mind: thoughts, feelings, fantasies, without immediately censoring or explaining them away. Observation means stepping back to notice the patterns in behavior: the situations that trigger certain reactions, the emotions that drive behavior, the ways your act changes with different people. These patterns might be subtle. A certain tone of voice always makes you defensive. A certain kind of compliment makes you uncomfortable instead of pleased. You dislike women with black hair and get sad easily. Each of these small recognitions adds to the map you are drawing of your unconscious terrain.

Once you can trace the outlines of a pattern, the next step is to work with it deliberately. This can happen through multiple methods: experimenting with new responses in your daily life, revisiting formative memories in a way that changes their emotional charge, or practicing a different mental stance in situations that usually trigger old reactions. You are, in essence, rerouting mental pathways, still using the same ancient architecture, but asking it to serve your subjective purposes. Repetition is essential. The first time you choose a new response, it feels awkward, even forced. But over time, with practice, the new route begins to feel more natural. Eventually, it can become as automatic as the old one was, an updated habit running outside of awareness, but aligned with your deliberate aims rather than nature’s plan of procreating. You may not be able to erase the old patterns entirely; they will always exist in the background, available if circumstances demand. But by strengthening alternative pathways, you give yourself more choice in how you act and react.

The process is slow, but it is cumulative. Much of your mind moves along well-worn paths, outside of awareness. The work is to understand those paths so you can walk them with choice. You are not just “becoming aware” in a static sense; you are actively tending the structures of thought and feeling you inherited. What began as a survival system built for your genes can, through sustained work, grow into a system more responsive to your own values and aspirations. And in that, you are doing something no other organism has ever done—you are not only following the ancient trails of life, you are also rerouting them.