Cognitive Thrift 61 – Capacities
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s not like – a lot of these things are basically another small group. They aren’t doing yoga, or meditation, psychotherapy, or some psychedelic treatment to alter their consciousness or anything like that.
They are doing their rituals and enjoying their time. A lot of the time it is a place to meet, and why not?
Anything, there’s more about the capacities of the brain there, too.
Rick Rosner: Well, the brain is the only organ where there’s a saying that we say there’s 20% of it. We don’t go around saying we only use 10% of our heart or 70% of our kidneys, but wow if we could harness the whole power of our kidneys, then that would really be doing something. The 10% is BS.
Things are designed to work the way they work within our bodies. You can sometimes do more, sometimes organs are asked to do more, but generally organs are generally working the way they’re supposed to work, and they aren’t leaving all of this untapped capacity. It doesn’t mean that we can’t do more with our brains, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not doing enough.
There’s something kind of Calvinistic in that you’re lazy that you’re not getting a PhD. That your brain is lying fallow. Our brain has a full-time job, which is helping our surroundings and making decisions about what to do with our circumstance, and because the brain is finite.
And because the brain is the only just about as good as it needs to be within a margin of error, error lurks around the corner all the time.
Error is not getting ready to kill us every day. We don’t make potentially or come close to potentially fatal errors every time, but I live in LA. Every driving decision, or any city, can lead to jeopardy.
We have our principle of evolutionary sufficiency, where organs aren’t going to be much, much, much better than they need to be because there’s been no evolutionary push for organs to be that way, especially crazily complicated organs. So, some of the areas where the brain can be challenged; it’s going to have limited ability.
That sufficiency most of the time. Limited speed, the brain can only calculate at a certain speed. Limited accuracy, which is that in combination with our perceptual system, knowing what it’s sensing – knowing what’s being sensed and correctly characterizing it.
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