The brain and the learning process

Edward O. Wilson explains why it is difficult to understand how the brain works; the brain was made to survive, not to understand itself:

"All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.
That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds-and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore."

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, Chapter 6.

Maybe, such explanation may give a beginning of answer of why passion -or the absence of reason- plays such an important role in human society.