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And yet nature has managed to find a niche for this dysfunctional behaviour as a subset of such individuals have used the extra useless brain cycles to produce new knowledge and ways of thinking that transformed the societies in which they lived giving them an edge over competition and improved the odds of the survival of their kind.

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Think of it as overcoming a local maxima. Thinking is expensive so requires more time getting food to supply that thinking, and then evolve that thinking to be smarter over time. The difficult part is getting thru the early bottleneck where your thinking isn't supplying massive amounts of excess calories that can be used on exploratory thinking.

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