The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".
It's a trade-off. The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth possible. It already uses a lot of energy(2% of body weight, 20% of energy consumption). We also need it to be working at peak performance when we are doing activities.
A background 'scrub' task to keep it working 24/7 would probably use more energy (require more food and heat dissipation 24/7), possibly require a larger area (for redundancy, similar to how dolphins can sleep one hemisphere at a time and have really large brains). An alternative would be to slow down processes enough so that those tasks could happen constantly.
And then our day/light cycles helped select for this approach. Until recently there wasn't much one could do (safely!) at night.
I wonder if it had been beneficial to have larger brains, we'd have evolved to support that. Diminishing returns maybe or just a local maximum we didn't get out of?
So if bigger brains meant people reproducing more, our brains would get bigger to the point that most births are cesarean or something.
I do wonder what happens when we eventually evolve to a point where we can't survive without more and more advanced technology.
A lot of people who would have died off before reproducing 200 years ago now don't, which is of course incredible for us. But what are effects of that 100/1000 years down the line?
Presumably we'll have plenty of more immediately pressing issues over that time frame.
Interestingly, there seem to be some indications showing that human interventions by modern technology already show clear evolutionary trends: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5338417/
Humans might eventually evolve to not even being able to be born naturally anymore at some point.
The continued existence of our species would become dependent upon continued civilisation. A dark age could kill us, or at least cripple the population.
*how true is this? Uni-educated people tend to have lower fertility rates.
> *how true is this? Uni-educated people tend to have lower fertility rates.
In the U.S. university education depends mostly on mommy and daddy's wallet size, not brain size.
Is that true? The 'birthable' parameter limits only two dimensions. Could the brain evolve to a larger size in a third dimension?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS1cj-zk4ac
Maybe there is some other limitation, such as distance between neurons? Signal strength?
True brains, after 16hrs of actual work, need to hallucinate strongly for 8 hours or so, in order to continue their high level contributions to society.
Taking this as a jumping off point for a way of thinking about those 'services'. It seems remarkable to me that we can initiate the attempt to think of an elephant, and then get there in one shot. We don't sort through, say, rhinos, hippos, cars, trucks. We don't seem to have to rummage.
Of course when it comes to things on the edge of our memory or the edge of our understanding, there's a lot of rummaging. But it could have been the case that everything was that way (perhaps it is that way for some animals), instead, there are some things to which we have nearly automatic, seemingly instant recall.
Or perhaps to keep us quiet and immobile, and harder to locate and eat ?
Why? If you can gather fruits or hunt pray while all your competitors (or predators!) are asleep, isn't it an advantage? What about nocturnality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality
At night it is harder to see food. It is harder to see predators, some of whom are in fact nocturnal. It is harder to notice visual cues and gestures from allies/kin. It is harder to navigate, both due to difficulty seeing distant landmarks and nearby obstructions, so you are more likely to get lost and/or injured. It is colder so your body has to spend more calories to keep you warm.
There are adaptations that can improve nocturnal capabilities, but these typically come with tradeoffs that make diurnal life harder. Evolution is a series of many baby steps - either you need to adapt to not sleeping while you're still at a disadvantage at night, or you need to adapt to being awake at night while you still need to sleep. Neither path seems like it would have been advantageous to our ancestors.
Definitely an area of study that seems interesting to me.
I remember, in theory you could do sleeping for 15 minutes 6 times in 24 hours.
The way I got it to work was by meticulously tracking my REM sleep. I would have sliding 3-4 hour windows to hit REM sleep and if I didn't, it just felt like a sluggish day, not any worse than being woken up by a fire alarm at 4am or a long thursday night.
There's hope. If the carbon chauvinists can be prevented from messing things up, AI is on track to provide something with a better SLA, which will finally allow us to decommission and junk those troublesome legacy systems without disrupting the business.
At all times, every single one of the billions of participants acts like a bureaucrat, delaying response until it's unavoidable and then resting afterwards at least half the time. If only we could cut through the bureaucracy!
Neuronal activities:
- Action potential initiation: 0.2-0.5ms
- Action potential duration: ~1-2ms
- Relative refractory period: ~2-4ms
- Total cycle time until fully ready: ~5-7ms
But at least there’s (usually) some exciting shows on while you are waiting!
Really poor design.