A week of so ago, I read an article in Discover about the shrinkage of the human brain over the past 20,000 or more years. Well-written, fairly interesting piece though it didn’t go very deep because only certified authorities were consulted for explanations as to what was behind the shrinkage. I was provoked enough to scribble a list of eight possible reasons for the shrinkage, planning an essay on the subject, for the heck of it mainly, but also to send to the author of the Discover article in hopes she might find it interesting, and perhaps do another article on the subject for some other magazine, and this time mention me. Or think enough of what I wrote to get my views when doing another article on the brain.
Yeah, more delusional day-dreaming on my part. But just to write an essay on the shrinkage seemed to me a good idea. Another achievement, if I finished it, and a chance to clarify my thinking about my knowlecular psychology, too. Also perhaps enough fun to break me out of the dry spell I’ve been going through as a writer.
This it did, for a day, for I wrote 1150 words about it Friday. Four or five hundred Saturday and another six hundred yesterday.yesterday. In the process, though, I veered into the evolution of intelligence and suddenly have too many problems to solve. What I thought I’d do a short essay about needs a short book to do right.
Oddly enough, one of my larger problems is defining intelligence. All I’m sure of is that it came long before brains evolved. I think it may just be “the ability of an organism to choose reactions to a situation based on more than one piece of knowledge. Presence of predator equals flee would be pre-intelligence, or a reflex action. Presence of predator when one has a spear equals destroy equals intelligence. Even though in the final analysis all our behavior is reflexive. It’s just that some behavior’s stimulus is both temporally and spatially larger than another’s.