The cover story of the July Scientific American is on brain physics. It persuades me that raw brain hardware was more important than I’d thought in our history. Here is my current best guess on brain history.
More seriously, there probably isn't all that much difference. Some athletes both expend and take in far more calories than most other people, but I doubt that there's all that much of a difference in brain energy use between healthy humans.
"While the brains of smarter humans today may use a better set of long term connections, probably most of their advantage comes from using more energy-intensive brain hardware. So it probably wasn’t until our recent cheap energy era that high IQ humans gained large advantages."
This seems like a somewhat testable prediction. Do smarter people eat more?
Regarding the limited number of neurons and subsequent connections, LSD and MDMA have been shown to open new neuron connections, even in adults.
Some of these were sensory - and useless intellectually. They were frequently characterized by the stereotypical "seeing a smell" or "hearing yellow", visual hallucinations, etc.
However, some subjects showed a -permanent- rise in IQ test scores after having taken LSD, and more pronounced spikes while under its effects (tripping?). They also showed benefits in other cognitive, deductive, and academic testing.
The tests show few patterns for predicting benefits in terms of strength, or specific test-section. The only predictions I could make from the evidence are - gains were more likely in young men-large spikes were likely to be in the deductive reasoning category.- the higher pre-LSD IQ of the participant, the more likely they were to show gains. Of course the majority of people bombed the tests while tripping all together. Interestingly, the lower the base IQ was, the larger the margin of loss.
If the higher IQ predicts a larger marginal gain, and the lower IQ predicts a larger marginal loss, what would we call that? A multiplier?
I need to take another look at the MDMA test results. I don't recall them well, but I know "emotional intelligence" and empathy dramatically spiked.
I guess the moral of the story is that smart people should do LSD?
So it probably wasn’t until our recent cheap energy era that high IQ humans gained large advantages. The tendency of smarter humans to choose lower fertility lowers their advantage today.
It does not need to be a large advantage, as natural selection can act on small differences in reproductive success over a long time, but the high IQ of humans relative to, say, other primates, suggests that the highest IQ humans had higher fitness than their peers for a long period of our evolution.
"primates have innovative cell designs allowing higher neuron density"
Someone work on the mock ad for the human body download from heaven. I'm not saying that human is better. I'm just saying that *being* human is clearly better. Who would argue?
I don't see it.
Robin, i just made a comment here that was accepted but hasn't shown up.
Some fictional evidence on that count.
More seriously, there probably isn't all that much difference. Some athletes both expend and take in far more calories than most other people, but I doubt that there's all that much of a difference in brain energy use between healthy humans.
"While the brains of smarter humans today may use a better set of long term connections, probably most of their advantage comes from using more energy-intensive brain hardware. So it probably wasn’t until our recent cheap energy era that high IQ humans gained large advantages."
This seems like a somewhat testable prediction. Do smarter people eat more?
Maybe I'm just an Austro-hack, but here is Hoppe on the issue.
http://mises.org/media/6523...
Regarding the limited number of neurons and subsequent connections, LSD and MDMA have been shown to open new neuron connections, even in adults.
Some of these were sensory - and useless intellectually. They were frequently characterized by the stereotypical "seeing a smell" or "hearing yellow", visual hallucinations, etc.
However, some subjects showed a -permanent- rise in IQ test scores after having taken LSD, and more pronounced spikes while under its effects (tripping?). They also showed benefits in other cognitive, deductive, and academic testing.
The tests show few patterns for predicting benefits in terms of strength, or specific test-section. The only predictions I could make from the evidence are - gains were more likely in young men-large spikes were likely to be in the deductive reasoning category.- the higher pre-LSD IQ of the participant, the more likely they were to show gains. Of course the majority of people bombed the tests while tripping all together. Interestingly, the lower the base IQ was, the larger the margin of loss.
If the higher IQ predicts a larger marginal gain, and the lower IQ predicts a larger marginal loss, what would we call that? A multiplier?
I need to take another look at the MDMA test results. I don't recall them well, but I know "emotional intelligence" and empathy dramatically spiked.
I guess the moral of the story is that smart people should do LSD?
So it probably wasn’t until our recent cheap energy era that high IQ humans gained large advantages. The tendency of smarter humans to choose lower fertility lowers their advantage today.
It does not need to be a large advantage, as natural selection can act on small differences in reproductive success over a long time, but the high IQ of humans relative to, say, other primates, suggests that the highest IQ humans had higher fitness than their peers for a long period of our evolution.
"primates have innovative cell designs allowing higher neuron density"
Someone work on the mock ad for the human body download from heaven. I'm not saying that human is better. I'm just saying that *being* human is clearly better. Who would argue?