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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: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @12:47AM (2 children)
Cooking food effectively "pre-digests" it. So by learning how to cook food, we radically reduced the amount of energy needed [scientificamerican.com] to consume it, which freed up that energy for other things like running our brains at full speed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Sunday March 26 2017, @04:14AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @06:34PM
Sorry but the fossil evidence points to the plains apes getting to the top of the food chain with tiny brains. They could as we still can out distance run any creature on earth. Our bodies were evolved to run. Brain size clearly had nothing to do with just about all our body's evolution when you look at the modern evidence. Just watch PBS Nova on it and that is enough to get the point across.
The big problem is that there are no signs of how these running apes developed larger brains. They didn't cook food with their tiny brains. The best theory I've read which I currently subscribe to is that these apes got to the top of the food chain and multiplied until resources became a problem -- as happens with any imbalance in a species but for them their tribes spread out as well as fought creating multiple evolutionary pressures on mental adaptability.
How did stupid running apes multiply so well? Well, by gathering over a wide area and hunting much more--- every animal runs away from a pack of rock throwing chimps.... and will run to the point of exhaustion. Make that a group of stick/weapon using chimps and even lions would lose from prolonged attacks -- not smart enough to realize fighting it out is better than getting over heated. BTW, the other big evolutionary thing we inherited besides being the best joggers is we SWEAT to cool off better as well! It makes sense doesn't it? Before you think it takes much brain power, look into how wolves will get prey isolated and doggedly wear it down working as a team.
So... why didn't dogs become smart? Why didn't we get tougher and stay stupid?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)
I used to work with a very clever and very productive owner of a small company. At about age 75 he was told that he had a lot of plaque in his carotid artery and needed surgery to clean it out. All of the people that worked with him noticed that he had been slowing down, memory lapses, the usual things that are often associated with aging.
After the operation, his surgeon told him that his artery also had a kink which was restricting the blood flow. The surgeon was able to straighten out the kink and announced that he would be getting 30% more flow than he had ever had. He lasted to 94, and if anything was considerably sharper, more creative and more active until very near the end of his life.
Just one data point, but an interesting one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @10:43AM
Kinks in arteries might not be good, but mild twists could be helpful: http://www.scotsman.com/news/revealed-new-twist-to-clogged-arteries-1-1292406 [scotsman.com]
http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/news_and_events/news/news_view.asp?newsid=3188 [mmu.ac.uk]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday March 26 2017, @01:46AM
What about the blood flow and brain function of other mammals? Such as whales and dolphins?
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday March 26 2017, @03:34AM (3 children)
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.
By this logic, a 90nm CPU (Athlon 64 [wikipedia.org], for example) would be real capable and a 14nm chip (Like Ryzen [wikipedia.org]) would be real slow because it's got smaller wires and it burns through less electricity.
Warning: Any conclusion based on this premise is probably somewhere between "fatally flawed" and "outright woo-woo".
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday March 26 2017, @07:42AM (1 child)
The Athlon 64 is a nice CPU though.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday March 26 2017, @02:23PM
The Athlon 64 is a nice CPU
Acknowledged... But for some reason, the Ryzen with its seriously inferior wire/trace size and similarly inferior ability to consume electric power, turns in benchmarks over 20 times as fast [cpubenchmark.net]. Go figure!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 26 2017, @07:50AM
And here I was expecting the over-endowed dwarf joke
(Q: why natural selection doesn't favour over-endowed dwarfs? A: they black out every time they get an erection)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday March 26 2017, @05:51AM (2 children)
a large subset of the human species still kill each other over what fairy in the sky to believe in.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2017, @09:18AM (2 children)
The higher the cognitive function, the higher the metabolic rate, the greater the blood flow and the larger the arteries.
Before someone gets to this, the obvious is men have larger arteries. Does that mean men have higher cognitive functions? Or it's not the size of it, but how you use it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @12:03AM (1 child)
Men have a saying: two heads are better than one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @02:13AM
Twisted! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXwMgIlmoaM [youtube.com]