Are We Wired for War?

A neuroscientist who advises the Pentagon says understanding the brain could be the key to preventing the next global conflict.

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Here’s a question to ask this Veterans Day: What if the battlefield isn’t just out there—but also inside our heads? In the new book Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain, neuroscientist Nicholas Wright draws on his experience advising the Pentagon and the British government to reveal how our brains are built for survival and strategy, in the office and on the battlefield. He shows that the same neural machinery that helps us cooperate, compete, and make moral choices also determines whether we wage war—or choose peace. Get a copy on Amazon or read on for five of his key insights.

1. Every brain is built to win (or at least survive) a fight.

Our ancestors faced violence, starvation and other life-and-death emergencies. That shaped every human brain on this planet, including yours and mine.

Travel through the brain and you find the same thing everywhere—survival-grade machinery:

• At the bottom, the brainstem is built to manage pain—an enormously useful alarm system that alerts us to tissue damage.

• A little higher, we find regions that are crucial for fear. These help us survive threats in dangerous, fast-moving, and uncertain environments.

• Then we reach the brain’s inner “maps”—not a metaphor—they are real, living maps that allow us to simulate moves and countermoves before taking risks.

• Further on, we find large areas for “thinking.” That includes judging others’ intentions and deciding whether to collaborate and cooperate or to compete.

• The journey ends at the frontal pole, an extraordinary region that helps us think about our own thinking. This remarkable human capacity gives us self-knowledge and helps us see ourselves in the world, so that we can make wiser choices that help us live better.

We all carry this equipment in our heads, and although it’s built for life-and-death situations, it’s equally useful for our everyday lives, too. Fear, pain, strategy, reflection—these aren’t relics of prehistory. We use these tools daily, whether that’s arguing at work, handling stress, or navigating relationships. The challenges have changed. The brain hasn’t.

2. Recent influential ideas on war are dangerously incomplete.

Steven Pinker argues that the arc of history tends toward peace, and though that’s probably true, that’s not enough to keep us safe. Wars do happen and they don’t win themselves. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky hopes that if enough people see war as bad or pointless, then we’ll stop fighting. But being completely unwilling to defend yourself might aim for peace as an end yet provide no means to get there. Other thinkers focus too exclusively on deploying ever-more powerful militaries.

All these ideas are dangerously incomplete. Major wars can—and do—break out. If we want to prevent wars or win if we must fight, then we must first understand the brain.

History shows us why. In May 1940, France’s defenders had more trained men, more guns, more tanks, and more planes than Germany. But German leaders had spent decades asking: how can we harness the brain’s greatest weapons—shock, speed, creativity, daring—to win wars? Their answer was Blitzkrieg. German effectiveness created the opening. But there was more to it: they advanced so far through an enemy with more trained men, guns, tanks, and planes because the French will to fight collapsed. None of that can be understood without the central weapon of war, the human brain.

And today? For years after the Cold War, democracy’s dominance felt secure. Not anymore. China now leads global manufacturing, producing as much as the next four or even nine countries combined. It dominates world drone manufacturing, has the world’s largest navy, and its tech is not far behind. Democracies can lose. Which is why we must harness self-knowledge of the brain.

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3. Our brains’ models are more useful than plain reality.

The world often feels like a direct readout of reality. You open your eyes, see the world—simple, right? But the truth is far more fascinating.

A model is a process that describes how senses can be linked to actions that help the organism achieve its goals. Think of a robin hopping in a garden, foraging for food. To catch a bug, it needs a model linking sight to action. Humans do the same thing, just on a much grander scale.

Pain uses a model. It alerts us to damage, but can be dialed down if we need to act. This is why a Spitfire pilot shot in battle can keep flying, because the brain’s models sit between sensation and action.

“Understanding brain models helps us predict our future.”

Perception also uses a model. It’s a sophisticated model that can include internal simulations of the world. It seems to us like we see the world directly. But only the very center of our retina captures fine detail. Everything else should look blurry. And yet it doesn’t because the brain fills it in, bending and warping reality to create a controlled model of the world and help us act.

Understanding brain models helps us predict our future. Human-machine interfaces will increasingly use augmented reality that superimposes information on our view to help us act—not because augmented reality is a Silicon Valley fad, but because that’s a natural extension of how we perceive.

Our orchestra of models—pain, perception, reflection, and more—makes us human. It shapes courage, competition, cooperation, and even culture. And it’s why, for now, no artificial intelligence comes close.

4. War will be part of AI, so it needs to be wiser.

Studying the brain shows where technology is headed. Augmented reality. Direct brain-computer interfaces. And new AIs that are sensitive to our tone, expressions, and even our confidence, emotions, and intentions—like a dog or horse would. But the brain also tells us something more fundamental: how peaceful can AI ever be?

Think of the stories we tell about rogue AI. They almost always end in war or extinction. I’m not talking about narrow AIs that file your expenses. I’m talking about the general AIs that OpenAI is trying to build, especially if they operate in the physical world.

If we give such an AI a robot body, how will it protect that body from harm? If we enable it to act fast to survive threats in dangerous, fast-moving, and uncertain environments, how can that not approximate emotions like fear? Self-preservation and fear contribute to competition that gets out of hand.

Even morality won’t save us. Human moral judgment is inherently mixed and slippery because it emerges from our brain’s orchestra. We can’t expect better of AI. Incompatible ideas of what is right and just often push us to war, and they’ll push AI, too.

“Self-preservation and fear contribute to competition that gets out of hand.”

Another remarkable human capability is to think about our own thinking. Self-reflection will always be needed for wiser choices when it comes to war and peace. Wisdom is seeing the bigger picture about ourselves in the world, so our chosen actions help us live better. No human, no AI, can be infinitely wise. But we are discovering much about our brain’s machinery for wisdom—and about ways to enhance our capacity for wisdom—and this offers us pathways to build wiser AI.

5. Self-knowledge is power.

As citizens in democracies, better self-knowledge matters. We help set the terms of public debate. And we must resist the easy answers—pacifism, militarism, isolationism. Churchill once said the greatest failing of democracies before World War II was “unwisdom.” We can do better.

Wiser people don’t just look away from things that are big and unpleasant when the stakes are high. They anchor their models to reality. And the reality is: we aren’t doomed. But we aren’t guaranteed safety either. The future depends on our choices.

Nothing can make war impossible. But self-knowledge—understanding why we fight, why we lose, why we win—gives us a chance to prevent the worst wars. And if we must fight, it gives us a chance to save civilization. Metacognition—thinking about our own thinking—is a skill we can all build, and it extends to our humanity.

Our creativity will always produce new technologies of destruction. But it can also produce new self-knowledge. The more I learn about humans, the more I admire us. We have a vast capacity for self-knowledge, and that gives me hope.