Human Evolution - Are we done??

seamus wrote: »

Actually I think we're becoming entirely the opposite. 200 years ago, you were lucky to go to school, you got a job before you turned ten and worked at that job for the next fifty years before you dropped dead. Your brain was no more exercised than the effort it took to do your work, go home, look after your kids, wash, rinse, repeat for fifty years.

We have now engineered our own personal freedoms which gives us the ability to effectively do whatever the hell we want and avoid the routine of the day - our minds have never been more exercised and fed with information than they have been over the last fifty years.

Computers and automated technologies generally don't "dumb down" what we're doing - they remove the mundane and easily-understood parts so that all we're left with is the more complex logic which we can't yet model or perform autonomously.

And it never has been. The vast majority of people live their life in mundanity. But that trend has been slowly eroding - how many people do you know have changed jobs over the last ten years, or gone travelling, or done varying forms of training and education? How many people do you think realistically had any of those options 100 years ago?

Computers turn a 6-hour manual job into a 6-second automatic one. Sure, it means that many previous manual skills fall into decline - think knitting and wood-turning, but that doesn't mean that people are getting stupider or losing the ability to do these things. How many people could carve a good stone spear out of sticks and shale? Do you lament that we've lost the skill of making a quality loincloth from bear skins?
We don't? So we're just paying universty professors and the ESA to sit around scratching their arses all day?
"Back in the day", you barely had time to take a ****, never mind mull on the trivialities of life. In fact, thinking about things was frowned upon - you accepted what you were told and STFU.

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

This is a myth. No scientific study has ever proved this statement.

Neuroscientist Barry Beyerstein sets out seven kinds of evidence refuting the ten percent myth:

* Studies of brain damage: If 90% of the brain is normally unused, then damage to these areas should not impair performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without loss of abilities. Even slight damage to small areas of the brain can have profound effects.

* Evolution: The brain is enormously costly to the rest of the body, in terms of oxygen and nutrient consumption. If 90% of it were unnecessary, there would be a large survival advantage to humans with smaller, more efficient brains. If this were true, the process of natural selection would have eliminated the inefficient brains.

* Brain imaging: Technologies such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allow the activity of the living brain to be monitored. They reveal that even during sleep, all parts of the brain show some level of activity. Only in the case of serious damage does a brain have "silent" areas.

* Localization of function: Rather than acting as a single mass, the brain has distinct regions for different kinds of information processing. Decades of research has gone into mapping functions onto areas of the brain, and no function-less areas have been found.

* Microstructural analysis: In the single-unit recording technique, researchers insert a tiny electrode into the brain to monitor the activity of a single cell. If 90% of cells were unused, then this technique would have revealed that.

* Metabolic studies: Another scientific technique involves studying the take-up of radioactively labelled 2-deoxyglucose molecules by the brain. If 90 percent of the brain were inactive, then those inactive cells would be show up as blank areas in a radiograph of the brain. Again, there is no such result.

* Neural disease: Brain cells that are not used have a tendency to degenerate. Hence if 90% of the brain were inactive, autopsy of adult brains would reveal large-scale degeneration