THE EBONY ROOM: A GENTLEMEN'S CLUB: April 2013

ON THE HISTORY OF LEARNING IN HUMANS…

Whilst conversing with an old colleague of mine about, of all things, ADHD, it occurred to me that we humans may have completely overlooked an obvious feature in our physiology that might change the way we theorize our genetic evolution. Casting my own theories of ADHD aside, I found myself developing an amazing theory on human evolution itself! As I understand it, the one of the accepted practises for treating ADHD is to literally “Slow-Down” the brains rapidly firing thought process to allow an individual to focus on a singular task. This elusive focusing ability is typically induced by administering chemical medication that, (at least in theory), will slow down the brains meanderings allowing the patient to “Sojourn” at some particular juncture in their musings in time to process all the many details associated with whatever it is they muse.

Skull of Homo-Australopithecus, Circa 3.2 Million years old.

Why on earth anyone would want to slow down a literally transcendentally prolific thinking machine is the subject for another discussion but let me say that perhaps our society may want to catch up with these “Complex” thinkers in order to achieve a quantum leap in human evolution or to at least regain one now lost to evolutionary antiquity. Is it not the goal of humanity to someday achieve a high level of intellectual prowess enabling us to process an infinite array of data simultaneously similar to the functions of a computer? Perhaps we need to closely examine the workings of those minds which clearly work faster than most human brains and not as a clinical exploration of some potential disorder, rather as a link to our intellectual future!

Using a jaded and as yet unproven model that asserts genetics is an evolutionary process I will attempt to briefly explicate my theory for you. It is a well-established belief that humans do not use a significant portion of our brain. If the theory of genetic evolution is true, that is, that organisms evolve to address specific needs, then at one point if may be we humans did utilise 100% of our brains. If this theory is true then what catastrophic event now lost in the chaos of what we do not and may never know about human evolution might have caused us to forget the simple process of thinking and have to undergo the millennia’s long process of re-learning to utilise our brains?

Image of Homo Zinjanthropus, Circa 600,000 years old.

Can science prove that the four distinct compartments that comprise a cow’s stomach evolved simultaneously or did the stomach evolve to accommodate a much more primitive model in prehistory? If so, if we are to believe that simple one celled animals one day climbed out of the belly of the primordial seas evolving into gargantuan dinosaurs then surely we can imagine a much simpler humanoid having a much smaller brain, perhaps the very size of that portion which humans use today, evolving an increasingly larger brain out of necessity to store all the processes of daily life. But what happened then? Is it typical for organisms to evolve organs that are unreasonably larger than their needs? Is there some genetic rule of thumb that says, “Evolutionary updates to physiology generally comprise a ?% to ?% range above that needed to perform the task that induced the change? For instance, a mother’s womb is highly flexible to accommodate the variable range of infant volume but it is never two or more times the size necessary to perform the task efficiently. So goes the human brain. If genetic evolution is true at all then at some point we humans utilised more than 10% of our brain capacity! It makes no sense for an organ to evolve with a 90% deficiency built in and there is no other precedent for this example in any organism unless it is an organ that has devolved for some reason.

What are the reasons for devolution? Well if an organ has been replaced by another process it will gradually be allowed to go dormant and shrink until it no longer exists. If an organ is just not being utilised any more due to some external factor that did not previously exist such as a social or physical catastrophe affecting the organism’s environment it would trigger a devolutionary response. If we examine the skulls of prototypical humanoids do we find larger or smaller skulls? If the human brain is only utilised up to 10% of its capacity then at some time we forgot virtually everything we ever knew! Let me repeat this in order to deliver the shock value it truly deserves… “AT SOME TIME WE HUMANS LITERALLY FORGOT EVERYTHING WE EVER KNEW RETAINING ONLY 10% OF OUR INTELLIGENCE”!

Image of Homo-Zinjanthropus.

If this theory is not authentically food for thought then what is? Are we humans a devolved organism that suffered some catastrophic event which thrust us into a perpetual dark age? Because of the inability to know the specifics of our evolutionary history and our cosmological history this is a topic that cannot ever be known short of an “H. G. Wellsian” time machine and that is not presently going to happen outside of a Hollywood dramatisation! So for now I will hold to my own private theory on the evolution of human thought and intelligence, that we were much more intelligent at some remote time in antiquity, that our knowledge was lost through some unknown preternatural or deliberate event and that now we struggle to recapture what intelligence was lost at a time far from our reckoning. Let me say about ADHD treatment, that slowing down the brains processes does not appear to be a promising means by which to recapture our former intellectual glory! Slowing down the brains ability to think is, in my opinion, an attack on the expansion, history and evolution of learning in humans!