SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The human body allocates 20-25% of its total resting metabolic rate to the brain, compared with 8-10% in other primates and a mere 3-5% in other mammals.
Thus we view the brain as a rather energy-hungry supercomputer.
This analogy with an electrical computer is a good one. The greater a computer's capacity, the more electrical power is required to keep it running, and the larger the electrical supply cables need to be.
It is the same with the brain. The higher the cognitive function, the higher the metabolic rate, the greater the blood flow and the larger the arteries.
The evolution of the human brain is unique among animals. We have looked at the size of the carotid arteries in 34 species of living primates that represent evolution toward the great apes and hominins.
Among these representatives of primate evolution, both body size and brain size increased, but body size increased faster. The blood flow to primate brains increased roughly in proportion to brain size. Only in the hominins do we see that blood flow increased faster than brain size, which indicates that the brain was not only developing in size, but in usage as well. And that shows our ancestors were getting smarter.
Would routing a firehose directly from our heart to our brain make us smarter, then?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @09:15AM (1 child)
a large subset of the human species still kill each other over what fairy in the sky to believe in.
Not quite true. What happens is people love to categorize each other into separate groups - logical tool to make things easy to remember. After that happens, then it becomes easier to assign all the faults of your own group(s) to the other. That's how it starts. "Fairy in the sky" is just one way to differentiate. Another is shape of your head, or language you speak, or where you were born. Of course, skin color is a gimme here too, it's just too easy.
It is always "nice" to see how predictable this is. But it is also easy to detect groups that are extremists - they will always try to split a society into groups and blame some problems on one or another. Every single time. Be that left extremists or right extremists.
Maybe they forget that in we are all in this together, and will rot in the same dirt. Maybe they forget that societies are built on cooperation and are always destroyed through division. But well, details.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 26 2017, @12:37PM
Let's see: You divide people into groups, and then blame some problems on one or another (namely on groups you identify as extremists). Fits your description perfectly. May I conclude that you are an extremist? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.