“some call it evolution, some say intelligent design”
i guess the apes (and whether or not i’m smarter than one) are still on my mind. this one is because of the scientific american 60-second mind podcast dedicated to the experiment where folks were asked to count passes for two teams in a basketball game. they were so engrossed that they didn’t notice a gorilla until the videotape afterwards. i’m brought back to remi vicente’s TOK 11 lecture on the topic: “the natives didn’t see the ships”, basically, we don’t see things that we don’t know to look for. there’s a lot of malcolm gladwell haterade gulped within these pages, and i kind of lost interest, but we made it through. here’s a gem:
“Seventy-two percent of people agreed that ‘most people use only 10 percent of their brain capacity.’ This strange belief, a staple of advertisements, self-help books, and comedy routines, has been around so long that some psychologists have conducted historical investigations of its origins. In some ways, it is the purest form of the illusion of potential: In some ways, it is the purest form of the illusion of potential: If we use 10 percent of our brain, there must be another 90 percent waiting to be put to work, if we can just figure out how. There are so many problems with this belief that it’s hard to know where to begin. Just as some laws cannot be enforced because they are written too imprecisely, this statement ought to be declared ‘void for vagueness.’ First, there is no known way to measure a person’s ‘brain capacity’ or to determine how much of that capacity he or she uses. Second, when brain tissue produces no activity whatsoever for an extended time, that means it is dead. So, if we only used 10 percent of our brain, there would be no possibility of increasing that percentage, short of a miraculous resurrection or a brain transplant. Finally, there is no reason to suspect that evolution-or even an intelligent designer-would give us an organ that is 90 percent inefficient. Having a large brain is positively dangerous to the survival of the human species-the large head needed to contain it can barely exit the birth canal, leading to a risk of death during childbirth. If we used only a fraction of our brain, natural selection would have shrunk it long ago.” (198-9)
so there.
metrotextual 