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Brain waves were fine-tuned over many thousands years of evolution. Stuff which modifies them greatly as this study seems to show probably has some sort of sid
by 21 8y ago
Brain waves were fine-tuned over many thousands years of evolution.
Stuff which modifies them greatly as this study seems to show probably has some sort of side effects.
Otherwise nature would have boosted them already.
- darawk 8y agoNature optimized them for hunting and gathering. I don't know about you, but I don't do much of that these days.
- VLM 8y agoBiochemistry doesn't interact with higher cognitive function, and its very common to describe tasks like software bug hunting, or sitting in a loud open office grinding out boring code monkey stuff like very light agricultural work. Certainly for the average office drone today, spear chucking muscles are atrophied, yet the thrill mood of hunting down and eliminating software bugs remains, pattern matching previous hunts, soaking in the environment, looking for signs, tracking, going in for the kill, the happy drudgery of dragging the kill back to the tribe or the paperwork of closing the bug out in the tribe's bug tracker and doing some git merges. Or tapping out calm tranquilized grind of endless lines of boilerplate java code feels like harvesting endless rows of cultivated berries. I wouldn't say the mood of labor has changed very much in some millennia, although the exact ratios of who's permitted the thrill of the hunt has varied over economic eras.
- darawk 8y agoSure, there are analogies between the two. But they're also different in meaningful ways, and evolution has not optimized us for their differences, which refutes the notion that we shouldn't mess with our biochemistry because we are perfectly evolved for the modern world. We're not.
- nissarup 8y agoWhy? It's not exactly "survival of the fittest" but more like "survival of the good enoughs". If there is no pressure, it probably will not be improved.
- hentrep 8y agoThe presumption in your comment is that evolution selects for brain traits which confer some sort of advantage. This ignores the fact that the modern human brain is used very differently than that of our ancestors thousands of years ago.
- mancerayder 8y agoIs there evidence that the human brain has changed / evolved genetically in the last few thousand years? A few thousand years is not a long time in evolutionary terms.
- nkozyra 8y ago> Stuff which modifies them greatly Like ... food? This is an amino acid, the building block of protein. Many amino acids have pronounced effect in the body or when lacking. Our bodies are fine-tuned to be somewhat fault-tolerant, but evolution is extraordinarily slow. If our diets diverge over a few hundred years, there haven't been nearly enough evolutionary cycles to compensate for whatever effect that has; particularly if it's minor annoyances like getting jittery with coffee, which was consumed far less as far back as a few hundred years ago.
- magduf 8y agoDidn't coffee only become a popular drink with westerners in the late 1800s or so?
- zimpenfish 8y ago> evolution is extraordinarily slow Wouldn't this entirely depend on selection pressure, rate of mutation, and turnover of, er, subjects? Certainly bacteria can evolve extremely rapidly and it's been noted in animals too, cf http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-lane http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-l...