The high level thought processes that allowed human beings to perceive complex threats that resolve them in creative, sophisticated way are what we have referred to as the cognitive operators.
These general analytical functions of the mind allow to think, feel, and experience the world in an essentially human way. These mental attributes have allowed our species to adopt creatively and successfully o even the most hostile habitats on earth

The functions associated with these operators evolved as standard equipment in every human brain because because of the adaptive powers, in fact, that evolution appears to have provided he human brain with a biological compulsion to use them. Gene and I have referred to this involuntary mental drive as the 'cognitive imperative,' it is the almost irresistible, biologically driven need to make sense of things through the cognitive analysis of reality

Researchers have provided support for the existence of the cognitive imperative by showing that the mind, when confronted with an overwhelming flow of sensory information, reacts with increasing anxiety. The researchers concluded hat this anxiety was caused by the frustration or the mind's insatiable need to sort confusion into order and the difficulty in doing so when overwhelmed by information.

There is a simpler and more compelling way to demonstrate the existence of cognitive imperative; glance around and try not to perceive a cohesive portrait of your world. Simpler still: try not to think. As any novice meditator knows all to well, the kind just isn't made that way.

The cognitive imperative drives the higher functions of the mind to analyze the perceptions processed by the brain and transform them into a world full of meaning and purpose. By doing so, it has given human beings an unsurpassed genius for adaptation and survival. But these cognitive abilities have a down side as well. In its tireless quest to identify the resolve any threat that can potentially harm us, the mind has discovered the one alarming apprehension that can't be resolved by any natural mean s -- the sobering understanding that everyone dies.

This grim discovery must have entered the world soon after self-awareness began to glow in some prehistoric human mind. The moment it did, the cognitive imperative would have diven the mind to find resolution. The problem would have engaged the cerebral cortex in the manner of any abstract thought, and, soon, the limbic and autonomic systems would generate an arousal response. the intensity of the anxiety produced by such a response might not be as sharp as the response generated by a more acute concern -- an earthquake, for example, or a tiger about to pounce -- but as long as it persists, the cognitive imperative will continue to bring the analytical power of the mind to bear upon it.

But death was not the only existential worry that early humans had to face. By comprehending their own mortality, they had stumbled onto a new dimension of metaphysical worries, and their questioning minds must have presented them with difficult and unanswerable questions at every turn: Why were we born only eventually to die? What is our place in the universe? Why is there suffering? What sustains and animates the universe? How was the universe made? How long will the universe last?

And, most pressingly" How can we live in this baffling uncertain world and not be afraid?

These are confounding questions, but the cognitive imperative cannot let them lie, so it tirelessly pushes the mind to find resolution. For thousands of years in culture around the globe, that resolution has been found in the form of myth. Mythos, in face always being with the apprehension of some metaphysical problem that is resolved in the mythic story through using metaphorical images and themes -- Eve eats the apple; Pandora opens the box. By learning these stories, and passing them on, our questions about suffering, good and evil, and numerous other metaphysical problems suddenly become answerable, knowable.

Essentially, all myths can be reduced to a simple framework. First, they focus upon a crucial existential concern -- the cration of the world, for example, or how the evil came to be. Next, they frame the concern as a pair of apparent irreconcilable opposites -- heroes and monsters, gods and humans, life and death, heaven and hell. Finally, and most important, myths reconcile those opposites, often through the actions of gods or other spiritual powers, in way that relieves our existential concerns.

Virtually all myths can be reduced to the same consistent pattern: identify a crucial existential concern, frame it as a pair of incompatible opposites, then find a resolution that alleviates anxiety and allows us to live more happily in the world. Why should this be so? We believe myths a structured in this way because the mind makes sense of mythical problems using the same cognitive functions it relies upon to make fundamental sense of the physical world.

The creation of complex mythic stories requires the creative, combined interaction of all the cognitive operations, but two of the operators appear to play especially significant roles. The first is the casual operator, which should be no surprise, since myths are essentially about the root causes of things. The casual operator, you'll recall, is the mind's ability to think in terms of abstract causes -- to link that chuffing roar in the distance with the likely presence of a lion, for example, or to trace the pain in your belly to the unfamiliar berries you sampled last night. In the moment-to-moment flow of conscious thinking, we take such casual associations for granted, but the mind would not possess the potential to understand the concept of cause without the analytical powers of the casual operator. Nor would it be able to crate the many stories about creation.

The second cognitive operator crucial to the myth-making mind is the binary operator, which refers to the brain's ability to frame the world in terms of basic polar opposites. Th human bain's ability to reduce the most complicated relationships of space and time to simple pairs of opposites -- above and below, in and out, left and right, before and after, and so on -- gives the mind a powerful method of analyzing external reality.