> Right now, right here in the real world, the cognitive function of brain tissue can be boosted— without engineering, without augmentation— by literal orders o

> Right now, right here in the real world, the cognitive function of brain tissue can be boosted— without engineering, without augmentation— by literal orders of magnitude. All it takes, apparently, is the right kind of stress. The implied benefits assume the effect would be cumulative... but perhaps sheer brain mass is not the limiting factor in a body, which is why these cases aren't as detrimental as expected. i.e smaller mass of brain tissue tries the best it can to fill the potential available to it. As a crude and purely fictitious example: what if something in the brain stem defines how much useful contentedness can be exploited? similar to how a north bridge defines to some degree how useful a "capacity" of CPU is - More is still better, but for many tasks there are diminishing returns past a certain point due to the basic bandwidth limitations. In this analogy these people would still have a fast bus, but a rather small CPU - but you can still do a lot with that CPU and fast bus if you use them in the right way and were forced to.