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arjunaaqa

Every time we see this argument “this frees humanity to focus on higher things”

and then we see what actually humans are spending more time on,

- not books - not people - but mobile - senseless entertainment (2-3 hours daily on mobile ) - social media

If we stop using a part of brain, and that function (say memory or calculation) donwe actually use it ever again ?

Or we are becoming more and more zombies ?

So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

Say what you may, but this extra time is not being used for meaningfup stuff.

Devices are becoming smart and our brains & bodies are becoming dumber.

Simple way to know if a high school student can stand against high school student of 90s ?

Or even researchers or programmers ?

In depth of thinking and agency.

I want this to happen but real world evidence is not saying this.

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Human brains were peak size few thousands years ago or something like that. Since then, average human brain started to shrink. I can't help, but think that's because of civilization freed our brains from the necessity to think as much, so evolution decided that spending so much energy on brain is wasteful and started to make it smaller.

I'm not really sure evolution works this direction today, we are not living in a food scarce world right now... But just food for thought.

"The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago.Exactly why is still puzzling researchers."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...

Civilization cannot explain this trend.

Human brains are not the largest in the animal kingdom. Are elephants and whales smarter than us? We don't think they are, but we don't really know. It could be that they're much smarter but in different ways, maybe somatosensory or social or other ways we don't understand. It could also be that their brains are less efficient due to less selection pressure for efficiency.

In humans there is only a weak correlation between brain size/mass and IQ or other metrics of intelligence.

Then there's utterly wild stuff like this that reminds us of how little we really understand about brains and intelligence:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...

The fact that someone can function like this is incredible and indicates that the brain must contain a lot of redundancy, or something even weirder is going on.

Stuff like that is enough to make you wonder if we know anything at all.

Another similar data point is the spooky intelligence of many birds, like crows, who have tiny brains. Flying animals are under extreme selection pressure for efficiency because they need to be small and light, so their brains have gotten very efficient.

You can't compare humans with elephants or birds. We are extremely different species with different evolution paths. It is very possible, that bird brains is much more optimized, but that tells nothing about our brains.

We can compare humans with our ancestors and trend is clear: our skull was getting bigger, despite the fact that it's not good for evolution, until some point after which it started to shrink.

Whether it translates to cognition increase or decline - we probably will never find out, we don't have time machine. But that's the most obvious assumption. Big skull is bad for birth, so evolution pressure on making skull smaller is enormous. Big brain is bad for energy efficiency, because brain consumes a lot of energy and food is scarce in the wild, so that's another evolution pressure. The fact that our ancestors kept growing head despite that evolution pressure meant that advantage was bigger. And intelligence is the only factor that comes to mind which can offset the negatives.

> So much so that most people are incapable of reading a book,

> Or even watching a 3 hour movie.

I agree with your thesis in general, but I don’t think these two in particular are comparable the way you’re phrasing them.

I have read books in a single five or six hour sitting but those were “by accident” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting to finish the book the day that I started them, I went into them with the expectation there would be pauses. Books work well with this type of interruption and have well-defined chapters.

A three hour movie, on the other hand, I see as a commitment I must try to not interrupt because it is designed as a single experience. Breaking it up detracts from the artist’s goal. Before starting it I must immediately look at clock and do some math: can I even begin to watch this movie, considering that in two hours I should <be preparing dinner | sleeping | picking someone up | something else>?

A similar phenomenon is when we don’t feel like watching a two-hour movie “because it’s too long” but then happily binge watch fours hours of some TV show instead. Even if we ignore TV shows are often designed to be more addictive, the fact that you have clearly delineated stop points—chapters, if you will—makes them a more manageable commitment.

A lot of people may use this free time/energy to immerse themselves in crap. Many will not.

I personally expect a major societal/cultural revolt against brain rot scrolling. It's kind of already brewing.

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