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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Your brain has 200 billion-ish neurons with hundreds of trillions of connections between them. Right now, reading these words, your visual cortex is doing edge detection and motion filtering. That requires FFTs and other complex computations.

Quick! What's 392 * 7374?

99.9% of people on the planet need pen and paper to figure out the answer. Our oh-so-adaptable brains can't seem to make a few neurons available for simple math. Heck, our brains can't store more than 7-9 items in working memory.

We're mostly unaware of our limitations because everyone else is similarly hobbled. But when we figure out a way to improve human minds, it will be a bigger game changer than anything that has come before.

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I'm sorry, I don't follow your point.

I was responding to "Evolution is actually quite horrible at engineering. Since it can only hill-climb, we end up with ridiculous designs stuck in local maxima". In my opinion, several qualities of natural life compare favorably with man-made engineering (which is the only other type of engineering I can think of for the purpose of comparison), therefore I disagree that "evolution is actually quite horrible at engineering", at least without some kind of qualification.

I don't understand the purpose of your 1st or 4th paragraphs; I understand the 2nd and 3rd as saying something like "human brains are limited", but don't see how it connects to my response.

Could you clarify for me? Sorry that I didn't follow and thanks.

The reason why people can't do that calculation in their heads is because of our reliance on computers and calculators.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguMYWW8EAU

In fact you can pull up articles with a quick search about how people can attain pretty good mental math capabilities through training. It's hard work, but it's proof of the adaptability of the human mind.

I don't know I already thought the computer was the first "lever" for the mind that we've had. The computer has been pretty game changing for society, has it not?

I learned multiplication long before computers were commonplace, and when four-banger calculators were still quite expensive. The reason I can't do that calculation in my head (well, I could but it would be faster to grab a pen) is that I don't have enough stable registers. I'd guess maybe two registers that won't get corrupted during the calculation. They're not big registers, either.

Regardless, I'm not saying that there isn't a technique that would allow me to improve. I'm saying my inability has nothing to do with ubiquitous electronics.

> The reason why people can't do that calculation in their heads is because of our reliance on computers and calculators.

No, we were never well equipped to do such computations, we didn't suddenly get worse at it with the invention of calculators. Consciously aware mental calculation is a very recent thing on an evolutionary time scale. I think even 10-20k years ago no one did any mental calculations beyond the most trivial arithmetic operations.

OTOH we have a pretty cool native physics engine in our brains and can solve pretty challenging problems such as predicting trajectories and modeling fluid flow. These skills were much more useful in our evolutionary past than arithmetic or algebra.

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