Pachyderm

Hmm! I’ve got a slightly different take on this. While in complete agreement. I think cause and effect may be getting confused. I.e.. Big Al wasn’t smart because his corpus colosum was thicker, his corpus colosum was thicker because he was smart. Oversimplifying, right brain activity is regarded as metaphysical BS at best and psychotic at worst. This view is imprinted at an early age. For whatever reason this imprinting didn’t take on Einstein. In western society the right mind has been shut down so there’s not a lot of traffic on the “road” The road was expanded (or more precisely not reduced) to accommodate the extra traffic, not the other way around. The same can be said of intelligence in general, People aren’t smarter because they have more neurons, they have more neurons because they are smarter. i.e. human brain processing is more efficient than a chimps, in the sense that chimps operate on bottom up thinking while humans use top down thinking with bottom up thinking being done off line. Indexing is a good analogy. It takes 3 ½ seconds to access the right hemisphere (bottom up) which would eliminate us from the gene pool. I takes about half a second for a chimp to respond because of his lesser neuron count. A reflex can be measured in nano-seconds. It’s all about time.

Or, when presented with a charging elephant, instead of marveling at the pretty wave patterns unfolding in the now, we need to find a big tree to get behind. A 1200 cc brain will get you extinct if you could only think bottom up. Sorry this is turning into an essay.

People think backwards.  Consider, why do we eat sugar?  Because it tastes good right, wrongo?  Sugar tastes good because we eat it.  Rotten fruit, (sugar) is a good source of energy so our brains are wired to give a pleasurable sensation when we eat it.

Or, you could say that in this case bottom up and top down thinking give mutually exclusive answers.