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> As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain.

This myth needs to die in a fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth

It's been said (I don't know how accurately) that some people do use 100% of their brains. They just happen to be in the midst of a grand mal epileptic seizure.

> This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me.

Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation. It doesn't know what they mean, it just knows that follows a certain stimulus. It's like saying I understand cloud language, because I can tell when it's going to rain after looking at the sky.

And even if that dog "understands" a thousand words, and you're scared of learning a thousand Chinese characters, you still have the capacity for learning Chinese. Or French. Or Spanish, or Esperanto, or Russian, or Thai. You could spend a year learning Russian, and we could have this conversation in that language; I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.

>Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation.

dogs do have conversations. And other animals too. Check the link on the prairie dogs for example.

>I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.

it is the deficiency of human-to-dog communication, not the dog's lack of mental capacity to handle the complexity of conversation.

> to the comment below on 10% - there is a difference between 10% capacity and 10% neurons. The fact that most of our brain is physiologically participating while producing that little capacity most of the time in most of the people is exactly the low efficiency i was talking about.

And still no. Phrase it however you like, it's still wrong. You are not using just 10% of your brain in any manner or means, there is not some great untapped potential waiting to be turned on, your brain is not low efficiency.

You'd probably be better off linking to something like this: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

Or this: http://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem....

Less than a million neurons and Portia's interpreting complex visual scenes and making detailed attack plans.

While "we only use 10% of our brains" is clearly bollocks, the implication that our brains may not be particularly efficient for our level of intelligence doesn't seem too unlikely given the way evolution works - our brain's a crudely scaled-up pile of accidental hacks guided by endless local maxima it can't readily escape from, it'd be very surprising if you couldn't improve on it.

You might draw parallels with modern computers. All these transistors to play with, but we're certainly not using them as well as we could - we're limited by the software we want to run and know how to write using our existing tools.

Does the dog have the capacity to understand how the universe works? Does the dog have the capacity to understand physics to the degree that we understand it now?

No. So the dog has its limits, as we have ours. Where the limits are is certainly up for debate, but hard to believe there is no limit.

Chinese characters are not 'hieroglyphs.'

And they are logograms, or at least they compose a logographic system.