Brain Beliefs

Our brain is an amazing device that receives an incredibly wide variety of sensory inputs—far more than we could ever interpret—and then distills all that data into a useful representation of the world around us. Evolution has taught the brain which kinds of information are relevant for our survival, and which to ignore or discard. Previous hominid species who went extinct must have possessed brains that were not quite as accomplished at this abridging task; allowing us humans to dominate.

I've written before of the amazing ability of the brain to receive differing and even conflicting messages from our fragmentary visual system, and still manage to create a stable, reasonably accurate visual version of the world around us. Although the process may not be all that accurate, it is utilitarian, it does the job well, and it keeps us alive and functional; which is the primary thrust of evolution.

Here's another example of how our brain processes the data delivered to it—in the interest of keeping us alive and thriving. We hear a lot about living in the moment—of responding to what is happening right now, rather than focus on what happened in the past, or might occur in the future. “Be here now” is an admonition that makes sense; attempting to keep us attentive to the present, to respond intelligently to the moment, rather than drifting off to the past or future.

But it turns out that our brain cannot actually attend to the moment. So the wisdom of evolution has taught our brain instead to create a three-second average of the overabundance of information it has just received. What the brain responds to—what it believes is reality—is an averaging or smoothing of all the data that's come in, over the last three seconds. 

This is brilliant! If it was not the case, we'd be wildly oscillating between instantaneous peaks—causing us to overreact to them—followed by instantaneous valleys—causing us to underreact to them. In the process we’d miss something crucial. We'd be endlessly flipping back and forth between tumult and indolence—experiencing wild and chaotic oscillations.

Instead, my brain smooths out all that vacillation—giving me a steadier view of my world. As a result, I’m less reactive to the extremes and more responsive to that three-second average. It's more conducive to my survival. My brain allows me to pay attention to that average.

So my experience of the moment is not the wildly-fluctuating moment, but a calmer version of reality. Evolution has brought about a situation that gives rise to my brain responding not exactly to momentary reality, but to a filtered and steadied version that keeps our species going.

Human Brainpower Bested

Sometimes I think we humans suffer from deep feelings of inferiority, because we so often tout reasons for our being best, or belonging to the better group. It's as if we are trying to convince ourselves of being superior, by expressing that my religion is better than yours, my team is number one, my kid is at the top of her class, and other such bolstered beliefs.

We especially fall into this game of snobbish notions when we compare humans to animals. Several hundred years ago it was an unquestioned conviction that we were absolutely superior to animals. We had utter faith in the divinely-created hierarchy, that placed God at the top, angels and other celestial beings next, humans next, and all the animals at the bottom. The major source of our supremacy was believed to be our brain—clearly larger and more complex than any other critter. And look around you... don't we dominate the planet? Is that not proof that we are number one?

That sense of superiority has been hard to deflate, but science has gradually been chipping away at our edifice of arrogance. Recent research is discovering many ways in which features of some animal brains, in fact, best ours. Here are a few examples.

Neurogenesis is the process of growth of new neurons, and thus compensates for the loss of neurons as a critter ages. Only in recent years have neuroscientists shown that we human oldsters do indeed create new neurons—though we get increasingly slower at doing so as we age. Yet we're bested by several animals, including some species of fish, who perform neurogenesis about 100 times faster than we do.

Secondly, we pride ourselves on our good memories, but chimps do much better at remembering. So do some species of birds and squirrels, who stash thousands of seeds in times of plenty, and then remember the locations, months later.

Thirdly, our sense of smell—a key brain function—is quite inferior to many animals, because that part of our brain (the olfactory bulb) devoted to smell is relatively small. A bear's olfactory bulb is five times the size of ours—even with a brain that is one-third the size of ours. The super smellers—sharks--devote one-third of their entire brain just to detecting smells.

Fourthly, our brain weighs about 2.5 pounds (1.2 kg). That is quite large, compared to our ape cousins, but a dolphin's brain weights 3.5 pounds (1.5 kg). And we are dwarfed by elephants and whales, whose brain weighs 11 pounds (5 kg). Now, brain size is not the sole governing factor... the brain-to-body mass ratio is a better measure, but even there we are overshadowed by our ocean-dwelling cousins.

Fifthly, without our GPS software on our smart phones, we are lost. Many folks today cannot even make use of a map.  Birds—especially pigeons—possess brain cells that are sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field. Rain or shine, sunny or nocturnally, they know their geographical location.

There are several other examples of how animal brains surpass ours, but that’s a good overall view. We may be the smartest (when is the last time you read about a pigeon winning at Jeopardy!?), but we trail animals in many brain functions. It might be useful for us to cultivate a little humility and recognize those brain functions where we are bested by the beasts.

Brain-like Ant Colony

An ant colony, according to some neuroscientists, operates roughly analogous to the human brain, where each ant behaves something analogous to a neuron. Individual ants communicate by chemical signals, which determines the overall behavior of the colony. Similarly, our neurons communicate via electrical and chemical signals, which result in our behavior.

If this analogy is appropriate, it raises the question, do ant colonies remember? Human memory is the result of many neurons acting together—creating retrievable recollections of past events and experiences. Our recall depends on how individual neurons stimulate each other. Short- and long-term memories employ different collections of neurons. Every time we summon up a memory, we rearrange some of the neural circuits and then send the memory back into “storage,” slightly altered. In this way, memories will gradually morph over time—although we tend to believe there's a constancy and an accuracy to our recollections. That certainty is really not there, however.

Furthermore, our memories are not just housed in some unique place deep in our brain. Our bodies—riddled with nerves and neurons—also remember. There's so-called “muscle memory,” by which we retain the knowledge of how to ride a bike or play a musical instrument. In response to wounds and germ attacks, antibodies and molecular receptors are created; they “remember” these events. The same mechanism happens for plants—trees “remember” physical wounds and insect attacks, so as to both heal and better respond in the future.

Back to ant colonies: If each ant is somehow comparable to individual brain neurons, and signals between ants are somehow comparable to neuronal communication, does the congregation of ants—the colony—display memory? Indeed it does. Although there is no central control agent in an ant colony, the community can remember, and that memory persists over days, months, and even years. Although an individual ant has a life span of months, the colony can live for up to 30 years, the lifetime of the queen. I have written before of the phenomenal behavior of an ant colony, as it performs activities far beyond what a single ant can do—such as tend graveyards and gardens, keep the nest clean, coordinate attacks, etc. These abilities depend to some extent on memory.

In fact, researchers have discovered that while individual ants can only briefly remember the location of food, the colony retains that knowledge for much longer periods of time. What's more, an older ant colony acts more wisely than a younger colony—showing an accumulation of knowledge over time.

The enhanced performance of large collections of individual creatures is often described as an emergent property. It is a process that has yet to be fully understood. Similarly, our memory—and in fact, our consciousness—still have much to be explained.

So if an individual ant can be considered to be something analogous to a brain's neuron, we might be grateful that an ant colony contains only thousands of ants. Were those colonies to be inhabited by a few million—or, God forbid!—a few billion insects, they would be smarter than us! Doesn't the possibility of having the Earth ruled by ant colonies seem frightening?

Idle Activeness

We modern humans often find ourselves frenetically engaging in one activity after another. Modern life pushes us to multitask and be constantly on the go. Our smart phones keep us ceaselessly in touch with a wide variety of people and events, threatening to rob us of any “down time” or quiet time, during which we can rest our mind and rejuvenate. Thus many of us go to great efforts to take a break to come down from our high alert state.

This is one reason why yoga and meditation have come to have so much appeal to moderns. People consider these practices to be of value to them, because the mind is considered to be doing nothing when we meditate; to become idle, to become blank, to rest. Once we go into mental idle mode for a while, both body and mind become refreshed and we're ready to jump back into the fray. It's as if our brain is connected to an on/off switch, that either allows it to be busy or renders it dormant. We flip from one mode to the other, as if our mind is polarized—it's either doing everything or nothing. There seems to be no gray area (sort of like American politics: it's either right wing or left wing, with no middle ground). Our life continues in either case, but nothing changes; no progress can occur, because we can't escape inhabiting and getting stuck in either extreme.

Modern neuroscience is bringing us a new understanding of what's going on in our mind while we rest it in meditation (or sleep). Even when we believe we've entered a blank, meditative state, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines show that certain parts of the brain (those that are mostly below the level of consciousness) actually become more active during meditation. These various regions of the brain do their own kinds of business and problem solving, autonomously, so that when we reengage with the world, we may find ourselves more creative, happier, and more effective.

But it's not that we've allowed the whole mind to “veg out” and recharge; we've let the conscious part of it become idle, as the unconscious part cranks up to do some work on its own. So we have more than just the binary on/off situation in our brain; it has other modes wherein the subconscious part automatically keeps chugging away, even during meditation, sleep, or idle times.

Creative people know that some of their biggest insights come when they are on idle, or even while daydreaming. Many of them have found that, after actively banging their heads against a wall, trying to figure out a problem, the solution comes unbidden after they go into idle mode.

So meditation is not just a process of turning the mind off, so we can let go our stress for a while—then jump back in, refreshed and ready to do battle again, just as we did before. It's more a process of getting the conscious “higher” part of the brain to turn activities over to other regions that can engage with life's issues and concerns, find ways to connect those regions and get them collaborating, so we can bring insightful and fresh ways to manage life.

Our Shrinking Gray Matter

Over the last 20-30 thousand years the human brain has shrunk by about 10%—from 1500 cc to 1350 cc. No one knows why, and few scientists seem to be aware of the fact or even want to look further into the issue. Maybe it challenges one of humanity’s most cherished beliefs: that we humans are the smartest and it’s all due to our big brain. Could it be instead that we are dumbing down? If you take a look at what we humans are doing today, you could make a strong case for our actions being pretty dumb.

We know when our brain began to grow: around two million years ago, when Earth’s environment changed. Vegetation grew drier, and our deep ancestors came down from the trees and also changed. Their brains grew rapidly. It’s not clear why their cranial volume grew, however. The debate continues.

There’s been a tendency for us to think that we need this big brain—else why have it?—as well as to think that we’re most special, just because we have it. After all, aren’t we in charge here? Don’t we pretty much get our way in this world, primarily due to our being so smart? We rule!

Scientists have created a simple measure of an animal’s intelligence that tends to work in most cases: the Encephalization Quotient, or EQ. It’s the ratio of the brain’s weight to body weight. It’s a rough but helpful measure of intelligence, especially when we’re examining the skull sizes of various extinct species and trying to guess how smart they were and what their capabilities might have been. The idea behind EQ is that the larger an animal is, the larger its brain needs to be, just for basic survival skills. Any surplus gray matter presumably can be then used for higher cognitive skills.

Our immediate ancestors—the Cro-Magnon peoples of 20 to 30 thousand years ago—had bigger bodies and bigger brains than we do, so they had about the same EQ as we do. Both our bodies and our brains have shrunk since then. Will this brain-shrinking trend continue—maybe even as our bodies hold steady—and thus make us dumber? Nobody knows.

A big brain has a major advantage: the owner is smarter (in general) and more adaptable—thus is more likely to survive. But a larger cranial volume comes at a cost: the large human brain, for example, hogs about 20% of the food energy that we consume. So having a smaller brain has its own advantage: it requires less food and thus makes life easier.

Other studies suggest that we humans no longer need to be as resourceful as we once had to be—back when we were chasing down gazelles and dodging lions. Our culture has advanced so much that we can be dumber and survive just fine today, since our complex and interdependent societies can provide food and safety beyond what our ancestors knew. Additionally, our computers do a lot of brainwork for us, and machines provide the brawn, so we don’t need either the larger brain or body.

It may also be that we’ve not really lost any intelligence with our smaller brain, just that it has evolved to become more efficient. If so, we could have our brain shrink, require less food, and still be smart enough. We haven’t used but a fraction of our mental capability so far, so we might do just fine with a smaller cranial volume.

Studies also show that creatures with smaller brains tend to be less aggressive. Hmmm… Has our big brain been the thing that has led us to be so violent? Might our species even benefit from a little brain shrinkage?

Domesticated animals—pigs, cattle, goats, dogs, cats—have smaller brains than their wild counterparts. We have bred them for tame qualities, so they are more docile and less aggressive, but that has also made them dumber. It may be that the same is true for us. If smaller brains really do cause us to be more peaceful, then I say let ‘em shrink! We sure could stand to shed a few ounces of aggression.