The Human Nature Handbook
Discover the hidden evolutionary drivers behind your daily choices and social interactions. Learn why your brain takes shortcuts and how to navigate the quirks of being human.
Like Duolingo, but for The Human Nature Handbook. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 9 levels across 2 sections, about 18 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through The Instinctive Self and The Rationalizing Mind. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in The Human Nature Handbook
- The human brain prioritizes negative information as a survival mechanism
- The amygdala triggers the same physiological response for social ego threats as for physical danger
- Negative stimuli produce more brain activity than positive stimuli of the same intensity
- Physical symptoms like sweaty palms and racing heart are the body preparing to fight or flee
- Survival software treats social insults as threats to our standing in the 'tribe'
- Modern social stressors hijack ancient survival circuitry
- Negativity bias in social feedback
- Physical and social threats
- The brain consumes a massive amount of the body's energy and seeks to conserve it
- Humans are evolved to assume 'agency' or intent behind sounds to avoid being surprised by predators
- Habits allow the brain to shift from expensive 'deep thinking' to efficient 'automatic processing'
- Recognition of negativity bias in social feedback
- Novelty requires active monitoring which is metabolically taxing
- Pattern seeking helps us find order in chaos, even when none exists
- The brain prefers a false alarm (hearing a ghost) over a missed threat (ignoring a predator)
- The psychological pain of loss is roughly twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives The Human Nature Handbook the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
When someone is mean to you, which part of your brain sounds the alarm just like it would for a physical danger?
Get it right to open this lesson and 8 more in the app.
Where The Human Nature Handbook takes you
- 1
The Instinctive Self
- Your Survival Software
- The Social Animal
- 2
The Rationalizing Mind
- How We Make Sense of the Mess
2 sections · 3 units · 9 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
The Human Nature Handbook is taught in the Explain Like I'm 5 style: no big words. promise.. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start The Human Nature Handbook today.
Download Tomo, search The Human Nature Handbook, and play your first lesson in under a minute.