"It' s possible to ask the big questions and answer them scientifically". Under this premise, the Israeli historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari wrote Sapiens. A brief history of humankind, one of the most read books of this century with more than 15 million copies sold. I believe that this brief history of humanity has revealed the interest we have in knowing and understanding each other as a species. Since we like to think in terms of thought, redundancy aside, we can answer big questions like those in the title of this article.

Thought is the activity that causes ideas to be produced in the mind. Although it has always accompanied us, it is necessary to understand how it has evolved. To do this, I propose a journey through this timeline that links our most distant ancestors to who we are today.

Thousands of years ago, the first chains of human evolution needed to communicate. Thought allowed them to express aspects of reality in interaction with the environment, but it did not stop there. There is evidence confirming that, since 70,000 years B.C., the sapiens produced ideas without any relation to their own reality.

This change meant something really new for humanity: imagination expressed through fiction and myth. The qualitative leap in thought, known as the "cognitive revolution," is considered decisive in moving humanity from the last to the first tier of the food chain. The cohesion and cooperation of the sapiens, on a large scale, generated a layer of reality over the natural world. From that, they imagined and established political, economic and other social structures.

Around 10,000 B.C., during the agricultural revolution, men stopped being nomadic and decided to settle in a specific place to cultivate and raise animals. The need for organization around resources arose. Sticking to one place put them at the mercy of different climates and seasons that determined food, shelter and other vital variables.

In this way, they began to think about the future. More important than meeting immediate needs, it became necessary to plan, calculate and distribute efforts. It is not difficult to imagine people asking themselves questions such as: how much do we sow, how much can we consume and how much do we have to save to survive? The birth of realistic, descriptive and planned thinking is located in this place of the timeline. A rationalist structure that brought about another great evolutionary leap.

The following milestone coincides with the establishment of empires around 500 A.D. The race for expansion began with the goal of unifying cultures, organizations and economies. Thinking became administrative and procedural. Order was transferred to the power of the hierarchy and, of course, bureaucracy was born.

This is how we jumped to the year 1500 A.D. The influence of the scientific method made us understand that reality could be recreated and replicated to observe the results. Method, the hypotheses and the measurements were incorporated into our toolbox. Deductive and inductive thinking made us better understand the environment and have more influence on it.

The scientific method permeated the economic terrain in the 19th century and led to the Industrial Revolution. Thought became more abstract, efficient and convergent. Our logic led us to establish parameters, identify patterns and find relationships. This is how we are functioning in a present defined by the supremacy of the internet and hyperconnectivity. The feeling that I share, after this small journey through thousands of years, is that the exponential growth of information and the development of artificial intelligence, has caused an environment of apparent disorder, with large amounts of unpredictability and complexity.

So, if we are witnessing the clash of an unpredictable and disorderly way of thinking against a logical structure that has been in place for more than 200 years, are we seeing the next qualitative leap in thinking?

Embracing the unpredictable is a gesture of good sense. I have not said this, it was said by Dr. George Land, a prestigious researcher and speaker in the scientific field, in the book Beyond and breakpoint. Mastering the future today, written with Beth Jarman: "The phenomena that are often labeled , often labeled ‘disorder’ and ‘randomness’ actually operate to provide necessary opportunities to develop a deeper, broader and more complex connection among people, ideas and things, both internally and with the outside environment”.

These deep, broad and complex connections allow critical, intuitive, divergent, lateral, imaginative, creative and spiritual thinking to be stimulated, become relevant and amalgamate into a new, more distinctive thinking type that I believe is challenging us to take to the next level.