Through human history, systems awareness — detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hidden within the chaos of the natural world — has been propelled by this urgent survival imperative for native peoples to understand their local ecosystem. They must know what plants are toxic, which nourish or heal; where to get drinking water and where to gather herbs and find food; how to read the signs of seasonal change. Here’s the catch. We are prepared by our biology to eat and sleep, mate and nurture, fight-or-flee, and exhibit all the other built-in survival responses in the human repertoire. But as we’ve seen, there are no neural systems dedicated to understanding the larger systems within which all this occurs.
— Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Daniel Goleman), Loc. 1817–22