Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers

I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article, Savant for a Day, is making me reconsider. I'd like to see controlled, double-blind studies, but Snyder's machine already sounds very interesting -- hey, anyone can learn to draw, but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode. EM-brain experimentation has taken off since Michael Persinger's work and other recent research.

Comments

Large cranium...

[TrueJim]

As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful (and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large, relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames. (Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90% smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Re:Large cranium...

[Planesdragon]

The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Then why do I have an appendix? (Or slim body hairs?)

Evolution does not look at any one characteristic. It looks at the whole of the being. And, between equally fit species, there's still a measure of chance.

Let's ignore the obvious rebuttal to your point (use of the brain's savant abilities is proportional; if we have a brain half the design, we might have half of the all-around intelligence) and focus on the evolutionary advantages of having unused brain tissue.

First off, we're able to survive brain damage much easier. Being able to be thwacked in the head and still bring food home--and maybe go out and hunt some more the next day--is an obvious evolutionary advantage.

Secondly, it increases mating. Having a bigger brain means our heads are shaped different--in a more asthetically pleasing fashion. The face is a human's primary means of identification and emotional communication--a clearer face is an obvious evolutionary advantage, within the species.

Thirdly, it's entirely possible that over the uncounted generations of prehistory, human-ancestor-groups who had savants among them simply outperformed other human-ancestor-groups who did not, thus neccistating a retention of the savant abilities. Not a clear evolutionary advantage, but a distinct possibility.

While your childbirth arugment is a good one, for it to work we'd need to have some mechanism to actually shrink brain mass at the start. Bugger me if I can think of one that'd work--larger hips would be a much easier evolutionary adaptation.

The Experiment in Reverse

[limekiller4]

"Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions. I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form."

I would think a more convincing experiment would be to start with the machine turned on for the full "10 minutes", the cat drawing made, then the machine turned off and another made. If this is correct then the second should actually be worse than the first.

The idea that the ability to draw better cats improves as you practice doesn't seem terribly startling.

Re: Great writep

[NialScorva]

What you have to understand is that nobody selects. I mean, an insect is really less evolved than a human, not to say an amoeba, and they are not marked for extintion per se.

Actually an insect is arguably more evolved than us, since it's generation time (and that of it's ancestors) is much smaller. An amoeba is incredibly more evolved, in the sense of total change since it's last common ancestor with mammals.

Selection is not an invisible hand striving for perfection, there's not a biologist on the planet worth his weight in salt who'll say that. Selection is a instantaneous direction, a random walk through the fitness landscape. At every given moment, the selection pressure is for what would most benifit a population (not individual) right now, with no consideration for the future or perfection. There's no appeal to a nature-god, no inferior or superior (let alone perfection), just a constant changing of directions for the immediate survival.