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NEWS > SCIENCE > HUMAN BEINGS NOW AS SMART AS WE EVER WILL BE
HUMAN BEINGS NOW AS SMART AS WE EVER WILL BE
January 9 2012
Basel, Switzerland – The human brain is really a remarkable machine. It has built tools, put men on the moon, created music, loved and hated. It is the most complex and diverse machine we have ever discovered, a marvel of organization and problem solving unlike anything else on the planet.
Being what we are, though, we of course aren’t happy with the human brain where it is. One of the things that has allowed our brains to grown so much and so quickly has been our unstoppable lust for new experiences and making ourselves and the world around us a better place, and that includes the capabilities of our mind.
However things have not dramatically changed much in recent years. Yes, we have had geniuses and the way we organize information is certainly changing in the computer age, but true leaps forward, the type of thing that will allow us to better understand what thought it, or existence itself, have not come and researcher in Switzerland believe they may know why. Simply put, the brain is as good as it’s ever going to get and it’s all downhill from here.
“There is a “sweet spot” in terms of enhancing our mental abilities. If you go beyond that spot, you have to pay the price,” Dr Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick, who has never liked other people being smarter than him.
The theory goes that the more complex our minds become, the better the chance of developing diseases like autism, reducing the ability of the brain to perform complex tasks in favour of minutiae.
Most of the researchers in the study did really well in school, but none are considered true geniuses, which tends to irritate smart people.
“It is true that we have not seen major advances in the human brain for quite a while, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t coming. Chances are that any major advances are things that we aren’t going to be able to predict. One truth of evolution is that it often comes fast, in a generation or less. The lead up is long, but the actual switch over tends to happen quickly,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “That could happen with the human brain as well. We may not understand the next stage, where things are going, but that only makes sense. I mean we wouldn’t want to have a conversation with a caveman and odds are the next generation of superbrains will just wait for us to die out.”
While diseases like autism can accompany complex artistic or mathematic ability, most patients are just simple, not unlike the healthy population.
“It could be that humanity is on its last legs in terms of brain evolution, that we have gone as far as we can and any efforts to manipulate the brain any further, tweak it as it were, would only result in damage and the eventual unfolding of the species, which would be pretty dumb,” continued Poe. “However this study doesn’t really resolve anything. It seems more wishful thinking than anything, without any real basis in science, which is the stupidest way to do science. It does get attention, though, and through that grants. That’s pretty smart.”
Traditionally, most doctors doing brain research aren’t complete and total idiots.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
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