Why Aren't We Smarter Already? Evolutionary Limits On Cognition
We put a lot of energy into improving our memory, intelligence, and attention. There are even drugs that make us sharper, such as Ritalin and caffeine. But maybe smarter isn’t really all that better. A new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, warns that there are limits on how smart humans can get, and any increases in thinking ability are likely to come with problems.
— ScienceDaily
Source: sciencedaily.com
Human Brains Unlikely to Evolve Into a 'Supermind' as Price to Pay Would Be Too High
Human minds have hit an evolutionary “sweet spot” and — unlike computers — cannot continually get smarter without trade-offs elsewhere, according to research by the University of Warwick.
— ScienceDaily
Source: sciencedaily.com
We ‘see’ through one eye at a time
A study indicates that humans gather visual information by shifting attention to one eye or the other, while the brain combines the incoming visual information so that the mind thinks it sees with both eyes at once.
“Maybe there are binocular neurons in the brain” — neurons that take in and collate information from both eyes — “that also know which eye that information is coming from and can feed back to that eye,” University of Minnesota researcher Peng Zhang said.
- The mind is inherently embodied.
- Thought is mostly unconscious.
- Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
These are the three main findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.
— Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh, p. 3.
A Natural History of the Human Mind: Tracing Evolutionary Changes in Brain and Cognition
“We suggest that ‘descent with modification’ aptly describes the construction of the human mind. The studies we have reviewed demonstrate that, although humans have certainly acquired many novel cognitive and neural specializations in the course of evolution, a large number of features are shared exclusively with our fellow great apes. Our hypothesized model explains how incremental changes in brain development and organization might yield apparent discontinuity in our species-specific behavioral repertoire. Taken together, we consider it inescapable to recognize the continuity in mentality between the LCA [last common ancestor] and us, despite the significant disparity in phenotypes.”
A really long but incredibly informative article from the Journal of Anatomy. It discusses what makes human brains unique compared to other primates and analyzes the characteristics of our last common ancestor.
Source: heywoahitskimbo
How we fool ourselves over and over
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have now written a book, “The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us” about all kinds of illusions we suffer from. We think we see things as they really are, but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness,” they write.
They cover the illusion of memory, how often our memories are born from our own embellished stories; the illusion of knowledge, we think we know much more than we actually do; the illusion of cause, we quickly assume correlation means causation.
The researchers are noted for their well-known experiment in selective attention, where participants are asked to count the number of times people in a video pass a basketball to one another. More than half of the participants are so attentive to the task, they fail to notice a woman wearing a gorilla suit cross through the middle of the basketball players, even though she stops and beats her chest before walking off camera.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/vJG698U2Mvo
Sensory perception, including vision, is subject to high levels of processing. Signals are picked up by our eyes or ears and transmitted through several levels of processing in the brain. Many signals are first interpreted by the limbic system searching for danger so that we can respond to that snake in front of us before we are even fully conscious of it. The various areas of the sensory cortex for vision, hearing, and touch gather the sensory patterns and organize them in a meaningful way by matching them to prior known patterns. Then the rear integrative cortex begins assembling all of the signals in order to try to understand what they are and what they mean. The signals are then passed to the frontal integrative cortex where executive processes occur, and then decisions are made about what actions to take in order to pass further signals to the motor cortex.
This is a simplification of one of many paths sensory data is understood and acted upon. In many other cases the signals bounce many times back and forth through different regions of the brain before reaching the level of cognitive awareness. These recursive functions offer suggestions that the brain acts as a complex system engaged in patterns of emergence. In fact, the brain is designed to filter out almost all incoming signals that are deemed unimportant so that the conscious mind can narrow attention to the things that are deemed most important and are most likely to require action or result in a reward.
This brief description does not even account for the filtering processes for what is or is not stored in long-term memory, a filtering process that has a significant impact on the accuracy of memory (with significant ramifications for such things as eyewitness testimony). This is enormously important for teaching and learning in education, and has even more fascinating implications about our awareness of the nature of reality (ontology) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology). Neither pre-Enlightenment mysticism nor post-Enlightenment rationalism have proven fully capable of explaining our inscrutable universe, but we have good reason to believe that our newest ideas of the embodied mind operating in a quantum universe are showing many positive signs of arriving at consilience among many disparate lines of inquiry.
