The human brain is specialised for the games we evolved to play. Neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith writes that it ‘represents the world as a reward space’. It’s coded to discover ‘the valuable things in the world and what actions we need to take to get them … everything around me exerts a push or a pull because my brain has learned to attach value to them’. As we’ve learned, humans value connection and status. In order to earn the resources essential for our survival and reproduction, we seek to bond with our co-players; in order to secure more of those resources we seek rank.
