I think this post illustrates the kind of thinking that made me hate molecular biology. I started studying bioinformatics with the plan of afterwards making a master in neuroinformatics and do congitive enhancement. I used to believe.
You basically think that there something called intelligence with has a clear definition which you don’t have to establish. Then you say that evolution tried to maximize that intelligence and think that the thing that contrains intelligence obviously falls in your domain of molecular biology and has to be ATP.
A while ago I tried to get a performance metric for my brain functioning and did it through a bunch of reaction tests. At the beginning I called it intelligence. I talk with a psychology phd and he told me if I wanted to speak to an academic audience I shouldn’t use the word intelligence but rather speak about cognitive performance.
Ten million years ago our ancestors made decisions very differently than todays humans do. Today’s humans use very different heustrics to make decisions and there no good reason to assume that we spent a lot of time from an evolutionary
perspective to optimize our brains to make decisions based on those heuristics.
Those heuristics allowed us to build tools and then everything went very fast and today we have brains that do a lot of amazing tasks for which they are not optimized. We outcompeted Neandertalers that have bigger brains than us.
What practical evidence do I have that this is the case? Take memory. On example from my physiology lecture was someone who nearly gets hit by a car while traveling to work. That produces information storage.
Even a year latter when the person has consciously forgotten the event the amygdala will still fire when the person gets in the same physical location and blood pulse will rise.
On the other hand if I hear a name of another person once, I will often forget the name a year latter. Our brains are not optimized for storing that information. Wanting to store the information does nothing at all but it would be very useful if we had something like a switch to mark information that should be remembered and other information that’s irrelevant.
In physiology lecture we learned that the brain always uses the same amount of energy regardles if we are “mentally active” or relax. On the other hand the intestines use different amounts of energy when they are actively and do hard work and if they are not. Really everything expect the brain uses a different amount of energy when it’s in hard work modus.
The funny thing about using therodynamics in the title of the post is that you just might use the term entropy at the wrong level of abstraction. Having a constant well defined stream of information brings entropy in a informational system. Given that the brain regulates to constant energy consumption, constant amount of glucose input might be more important than it’s quantity for intelligence.
But let’s go back to hard mental work. At the beginning I couldn’t believe that the brain uses the same amount of energy. It’s a consensus belief if you look at biology stackexchange.
One of the core reason why I didn’t believe was mnemonics. Memorizing a deck of card in half an hour was for me a very challenging mental activity. It made me breath faster. It was kind of obvious that my brain needed more energy for doing hard mental work and I therefore breathed faster. But my physiology professor wasn’t convinced. He told me that things aren’t as straightforward.
My problem was that doing mnemonics triggered a stress response. That stress response was completely unnecessary. The brain doesn’t need more energy. On the other hand the stress does reduce cogntiive function and made practicing mnemonics really uncomfortable.
At the time I didn’t know enough about emotions to tackle the problem at it’s core, remove the unncessary stress response and focus on learning mnemonics. In the end I let it go, because memorizing decks of cards isn’t really a useful lifeskill anyway.
The same goes for other delibrate practice of mental skills. Humans can’t simply do delibrate practice for 8 hours per day, because a bunch of emotional crap triggers and cost resources.
3 million years ago monkey’s wouldn’t want to practice memorizing decks of cards for 3 hours in a row or proving math theorems for hours on end. Our emotional system is not made for that.
It’s rather made for preparing for running after the animal that we are hunting when we use our mental prowness to read it’s tracks.
Humans are also doing other strange things when it comes to emotions. Nearly every animal has sex at times of the year when it makes sense to have sex. In the mating session. We humans don’t interact with our emotions that way. We have simply sex all the time, because having sex is fun. Just like our vitamin C production, something broke about making smart mating choices. Evolution is chaos. All that mental stuff distracts us from reacting to our emotions in a way that we do substantially different things in May then in September. The price of having heuristics that are useful for tool making was worth it.
Too many people are still Darwinists in the sense that believe all evolution is about natural selection. They don’t understand the huge effects of genetic drift and other ways that process break down and really aren’t optimized.
The pickup community who thinks that it’s natural that a male always wants sex has got it very wrong. Most species don’t behave that way. It’s more of an accident. Things aren’t working as they should, because man suddenly started to use his brain differently than most other species.
If we want to succeed with cognitive enhancement, the solutions won’t be at the molecular biology level or seen in fMRI images. We need to understand a lot about how humans process information that’s not on those levels. The important bottlenecks are not on that level.
That’s a good point about intelligence, the way I used that word without defining it in this article is sloppy.
I am interested in the ability to solve important problems. Maybe instead I should talk about something more easily definable such as mental endurance, or limiting the stress response from focused work? Personally, I think if I could work longer in one sitting on a hard problem without stress or fatigue, that alone would count as “increased intelligence” for practical purposes.
I think there are links between the stress response and nutrient availability. In lab mice anyway, sugar seems to reduce stress hormone production during stressful situations. However in practice this might be harmful to doing focused work, if stress improves focus.
Thanks for pointing out the issue of brain energy consumption vs mental activity. I think this entire article hinges on the (unfounded?) assumption that the two are strongly correlated. I am confused about this, and need to learn more about it. I see many articles and researchers claim massive increases in energy consumption with hard mental activity, and others that claim there is none which seems very strange. How are they measuring this? I wonder if people under general anesthesia have much lower, or about the same energy requirements as an awake person?
I am interested in the ability to solve important problems.
Do you have an argument for why we should have had evolutionary pressure for solving the kind of issues that we today consider to be important problems?
When it comes like a mental task such as memorizing a deck of card there are simply massive improvement when one uses mnemonics and trains then when one doesn’t. To me it doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason to think that the same isn’t true with working on important problems.
Maybe instead I should talk about something more easily definable such as mental endurance, or limiting the stress response from focused work? Personally, I think if I could work longer in one sitting on a hard problem without stress or fatigue, that alone would count as “increased intelligence” for practical purposes.
Going around and arguing that it’s a fixed resource you might effectively reduce willpower. The quest for a molecular biological framing of the problem might be hurting people’s ability to solve important problems because it gives them the wrong beliefs and those beliefs matter for their performance.
Maybe the emporer has no clothes and we should just stop the project and insteadly focus on programming the right beliefs into people. I know I’m moving into dangerous waters if I say those things on Lesswrong ;).
The more I think about concepts like stress the more new questions popup. There are things happens in my body for which I developed qualia through Danis Bois perceptive padagogy where unfortunately the main body of written work is in French.
I have seen that there are interesting things to be done with hypnosis when it comes to emotional management but the resulting literature is also not straightforward.
I probably need good test subjects and further time thinking about detail and improving my own perception. Maybe find a way to calibrate my percerption.
In lab mice anyway, sugar seems to reduce stress hormone production during stressful situations.
Are we talking about production in the sense of making new hormones or are we talking about secreting already existing hormones? Do you know the time frames?
I see many articles and researchers claim massive increases in energy consumption with hard mental activity, and others that claim there is none which seems very strange. How are they measuring this?
Unfortunately I have to confess I don’t know. I think at the time I took the relevant lessons I was too shy to really press for evidence. It’s says something about biology science eduction.
There are so many claims about how things happen to be but in textbooks and lectures there not that much emphasis on how we know them.
I think this post illustrates the kind of thinking that made me hate molecular biology. I started studying bioinformatics with the plan of afterwards making a master in neuroinformatics and do congitive enhancement. I used to believe.
You basically think that there something called intelligence with has a clear definition which you don’t have to establish. Then you say that evolution tried to maximize that intelligence and think that the thing that contrains intelligence obviously falls in your domain of molecular biology and has to be ATP.
A while ago I tried to get a performance metric for my brain functioning and did it through a bunch of reaction tests. At the beginning I called it intelligence. I talk with a psychology phd and he told me if I wanted to speak to an academic audience I shouldn’t use the word intelligence but rather speak about cognitive performance.
Ten million years ago our ancestors made decisions very differently than todays humans do. Today’s humans use very different heustrics to make decisions and there no good reason to assume that we spent a lot of time from an evolutionary perspective to optimize our brains to make decisions based on those heuristics.
Those heuristics allowed us to build tools and then everything went very fast and today we have brains that do a lot of amazing tasks for which they are not optimized. We outcompeted Neandertalers that have bigger brains than us.
What practical evidence do I have that this is the case? Take memory. On example from my physiology lecture was someone who nearly gets hit by a car while traveling to work. That produces information storage. Even a year latter when the person has consciously forgotten the event the amygdala will still fire when the person gets in the same physical location and blood pulse will rise.
On the other hand if I hear a name of another person once, I will often forget the name a year latter. Our brains are not optimized for storing that information. Wanting to store the information does nothing at all but it would be very useful if we had something like a switch to mark information that should be remembered and other information that’s irrelevant.
In physiology lecture we learned that the brain always uses the same amount of energy regardles if we are “mentally active” or relax. On the other hand the intestines use different amounts of energy when they are actively and do hard work and if they are not. Really everything expect the brain uses a different amount of energy when it’s in hard work modus.
The funny thing about using therodynamics in the title of the post is that you just might use the term entropy at the wrong level of abstraction. Having a constant well defined stream of information brings entropy in a informational system. Given that the brain regulates to constant energy consumption, constant amount of glucose input might be more important than it’s quantity for intelligence.
But let’s go back to hard mental work. At the beginning I couldn’t believe that the brain uses the same amount of energy. It’s a consensus belief if you look at biology stackexchange.
One of the core reason why I didn’t believe was mnemonics. Memorizing a deck of card in half an hour was for me a very challenging mental activity. It made me breath faster. It was kind of obvious that my brain needed more energy for doing hard mental work and I therefore breathed faster. But my physiology professor wasn’t convinced. He told me that things aren’t as straightforward.
My problem was that doing mnemonics triggered a stress response. That stress response was completely unnecessary. The brain doesn’t need more energy. On the other hand the stress does reduce cogntiive function and made practicing mnemonics really uncomfortable. At the time I didn’t know enough about emotions to tackle the problem at it’s core, remove the unncessary stress response and focus on learning mnemonics. In the end I let it go, because memorizing decks of cards isn’t really a useful lifeskill anyway.
The same goes for other delibrate practice of mental skills. Humans can’t simply do delibrate practice for 8 hours per day, because a bunch of emotional crap triggers and cost resources.
3 million years ago monkey’s wouldn’t want to practice memorizing decks of cards for 3 hours in a row or proving math theorems for hours on end. Our emotional system is not made for that.
It’s rather made for preparing for running after the animal that we are hunting when we use our mental prowness to read it’s tracks.
Humans are also doing other strange things when it comes to emotions. Nearly every animal has sex at times of the year when it makes sense to have sex. In the mating session. We humans don’t interact with our emotions that way. We have simply sex all the time, because having sex is fun. Just like our vitamin C production, something broke about making smart mating choices. Evolution is chaos. All that mental stuff distracts us from reacting to our emotions in a way that we do substantially different things in May then in September. The price of having heuristics that are useful for tool making was worth it.
Too many people are still Darwinists in the sense that believe all evolution is about natural selection. They don’t understand the huge effects of genetic drift and other ways that process break down and really aren’t optimized.
The pickup community who thinks that it’s natural that a male always wants sex has got it very wrong. Most species don’t behave that way. It’s more of an accident. Things aren’t working as they should, because man suddenly started to use his brain differently than most other species.
If we want to succeed with cognitive enhancement, the solutions won’t be at the molecular biology level or seen in fMRI images. We need to understand a lot about how humans process information that’s not on those levels. The important bottlenecks are not on that level.
That’s a good point about intelligence, the way I used that word without defining it in this article is sloppy.
I am interested in the ability to solve important problems. Maybe instead I should talk about something more easily definable such as mental endurance, or limiting the stress response from focused work? Personally, I think if I could work longer in one sitting on a hard problem without stress or fatigue, that alone would count as “increased intelligence” for practical purposes.
I think there are links between the stress response and nutrient availability. In lab mice anyway, sugar seems to reduce stress hormone production during stressful situations. However in practice this might be harmful to doing focused work, if stress improves focus.
Thanks for pointing out the issue of brain energy consumption vs mental activity. I think this entire article hinges on the (unfounded?) assumption that the two are strongly correlated. I am confused about this, and need to learn more about it. I see many articles and researchers claim massive increases in energy consumption with hard mental activity, and others that claim there is none which seems very strange. How are they measuring this? I wonder if people under general anesthesia have much lower, or about the same energy requirements as an awake person?
Do you have an argument for why we should have had evolutionary pressure for solving the kind of issues that we today consider to be important problems?
When it comes like a mental task such as memorizing a deck of card there are simply massive improvement when one uses mnemonics and trains then when one doesn’t. To me it doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason to think that the same isn’t true with working on important problems.
I agree. The interesting thing on that question is that believing whether or not willpower is limited seems to have an effect: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038680
Going around and arguing that it’s a fixed resource you might effectively reduce willpower. The quest for a molecular biological framing of the problem might be hurting people’s ability to solve important problems because it gives them the wrong beliefs and those beliefs matter for their performance.
Maybe the emporer has no clothes and we should just stop the project and insteadly focus on programming the right beliefs into people. I know I’m moving into dangerous waters if I say those things on Lesswrong ;).
The more I think about concepts like stress the more new questions popup. There are things happens in my body for which I developed qualia through Danis Bois perceptive padagogy where unfortunately the main body of written work is in French.
I have seen that there are interesting things to be done with hypnosis when it comes to emotional management but the resulting literature is also not straightforward.
I probably need good test subjects and further time thinking about detail and improving my own perception. Maybe find a way to calibrate my percerption.
Are we talking about production in the sense of making new hormones or are we talking about secreting already existing hormones? Do you know the time frames?
Unfortunately I have to confess I don’t know. I think at the time I took the relevant lessons I was too shy to really press for evidence. It’s says something about biology science eduction. There are so many claims about how things happen to be but in textbooks and lectures there not that much emphasis on how we know them.