Evolved, Not Designed: Magnificent Brain

The human brain is a hodge-podge Swiss Army Knife of cognitive skills, driven by emotions, instincts, and physiologic drives. Almost all of our explanations for why we do what we do, are wrong. Is it any wonder that human-level machine intelligence is already "several decades overdue"?

Romance is like addiction in the brain. Not really surprising. In terms of procreation and providing for helpless infants and toddlers, it has proved a rather useful addiction indeed.

Sleep is needed to form memories. The researchers demonstrated that sleep is needed for the brain to develop through the "critical developmental windows." As far as how much sleep an adult human really needs for normal functioning, I suspect that it all depends upon the particular human's genome, his actual job demands and life demands. I suspect that most adults could do quite well on half the sleep they actually get, once we understand what sleep does and how to help it to get done.

External choices are given higher priority than internal choices. This makes sense for individuals with under-developed or damaged frontal lobes. For others with a strong sense of self efficacy and skepticism toward outside authority, the findings might be completely different. Psychological neoteny involves a perpetual adolescent incompetence, being stuck at the stage before the pre-frontal lobes are fully developed. Present society is full of such people, which makes academic lobotomy and "media lobotomy" much easier to perform.

Brain training helps memory and real world performance in the elderly. Imagine that! When you force the brain to work, it performs better. I experience a similar "thought acceleration" when flying a plane, compared to driving a car. Likewise when performing anesthesia on a difficult neurosurgical case requiring extreme precision, the mind seems to perform at almost super human levels. Subsequent real life seems to take place extremely slowly in comparison.

Duplication in genes leads humans to branch from other primates. This article requires a blog posting of its own, its implications are so rich.

It is only reasonable that humans do not understand their own brains. Opportunists may discover particular "hacks" that allow them to take advantage of those around them. Hucksters, magicians, advertising geniuses, politicians, media tycoons -- the successful ones understand how to fool the human mind. Some of the people, all of the time. Even all of the people some of the time. But all of the people, all of the time? They are working on it.