Why is the human brain so weak?

[Akka]

Saying the brain is weak is just some kind of self-fulfilling statement.

 

[holy king]

Depression and suicide rates are higher in rural areas than in urban areas. Also, whites have higher rates of depression and suicides than blacks and Hispanics. Do you have an alternate hypothesis, one that would try to explain as to why depression is more prevalent in rural areas?

underdiagnosis in rural areas. or overdiagnosis in urban ones.

key point is you dont go to no stinking psycho doctor in rural areas.




edit: wait, seriously the other way round? have any statistics?

 

[MantaRevan]

That's a good analogy except that it's wrong. Evolution edits out bad changes as well - the only exception to which is if the bad change always accompanies a good change which more than cancels it out, or the bad change doesn't have an impact on the number of grandchildren that an organism has.

Absolutely. To demonstrate, scientists think that we are "evolving out" of our pinky toe, as we no long use it to grip rocks or trees, and as a result, it's getting smaller and less significant until someone has a baby with no pinky toe.

 

[El_Machinae]

Mental illness is higher, in general, in urban environments. In fact, there's good suggestion that it's caused by urban environments. Statistics suggest that we'd have half the incidence of schizophrenia if everyone was rural.

It's not because our brain is weak - it's because it's so complex.

It's basically a 6 layered brain, each one evolved on top of another one. I think it's 6 layers anyway.. One of them is an amphibian brain, one is a reptilian.

So yeah... it's incredibly complex. Every once in a while something will go wrong. You can't compare it to the Vulcan brain because Vulcans don't exist.

Close!

It's actually that our brain has three major components
reptilian brain, mammalian overlay, super-awesome human augmentation on top

The reptilian brain is massively integrated into our body, and is responsible for controlling our homeostasis, etc. It's what increasing your breathing when you're winded and what increases your motivation to eat when you're hungry.

The mammalian brain is overlaid onto that (and it's what has six layers, the six layered cortex). It's the cognitive machine, and is capable of predicting the outside world, creating hypotheses, performing experiments, etc. It's also completely integrated with the reptilian brain. It perceives the signals from the body. It's what creates a feeling of crankiness and surliness when you're hungry or tired (as part of the motivating process).

The human cortex is grown out of the mammalian brain. It's not a new feature, it's just the old feature that's been super-expanded. A horse is stronger than a mouse, not because of new anatomy, but because of slightly rejigged anatomy that's been made way more powerful. Likewise, our frontal cortex is massively expanded, but it's more of the same structure. It's just bigger.

What's expanded in the humans is partly our ability to perceive, but mostly to predict and form hypotheses. This has allowed us greater integration into our emotions, and allowed us to perceive (and predict) our emotions much better. So, we get meta-motivation. We're motivated by our emotions, but then we're motivated by what we want our emotions to be.

 

[Synobun]

Absolutely. To demonstrate, scientists think that we are "evolving out" of our pinky toe, as we no long use it to grip rocks or trees, and as a result, it's getting smaller and less significant until someone has a baby with no pinky toe.

I can attest to this. My pinky toes are just about tiny stubs. One doesn't even have a nail anymore. I am willing to bet that if I have children they will have the same thing.

Anyways, it is not that the Human brain is weak, just complex. We have sentience and emotions. They are bound to conflict every now and then up there in the 'ol barn on top. A lot of today's "mental disorders" can be solved with simple common sense and no usage of pills and needles, but the psyche business has turned into a money grab. This may have something to do with disorders becoming more and more common in today's world because somebody with a slight problem gets diagnosed with a full-blown disorder and is put on pills.

A good example of this is an old friend of mine. She does not pay attention to things she doesn't care about. Sounds pretty common, right? Nothing wrong with this, right? She got diagnosed with severe ADHD for it and immediately got put on a handful of pills, and her psychiatrist probably went home with a pretty good paycheque.

I'm all for helping people, but throwing a disorder at them and prescribing pills is not the way to go, and I feel that doing this is what makes our emotions our worst enemy.

 

[warpus]

@El_Machinae That's very interesting, I should do more reading about this crazy brain of ours

Too bad we don't understand so much of it

 

[G-Max]

That's a good analogy except that it's wrong. Evolution edits out bad changes as well

I didn't say "bad changes". I said weaknesses. The Intel Atom is a fine chip for its level of complexity, but you won't find it as a part of a Core i7. Why? Because it wouldn't be worth the die space.

I'm always amazed at the lack of other peoples' reading comprehension over the Internet.

 

[dirtyparrot]

What I'm really asking is why humans have such complex emotions. Why is this necessary for our existence? Animals seem to get by just fine using mostly instinct alone. Why can't humans be like this?

How do you know that animals don't suffer from mental illnesses as well?

 

[G-Max]

My mom's cat is bipolar.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Emotions are actually integral to our reasoning capacity. We do not yet really know this works, but studies routinely show that the same parts of the brain are used for emotional and rational thought and that we don't think as well without emotions.


It should be noted that Vulcans are not really emotionless beings in the Star trek canon. Vulcan emotions are actually stronger and more volatile than their human counterparts. The Vulcans work to suppress or purge their emotions because without such discipline they would all suffer from disorders like BPD.

 

[Flying Pig]

I didn't say "bad changes". I said weaknesses. The Intel Atom is a fine chip for its level of complexity, but you won't find it as a part of a Core i7. Why? Because it wouldn't be worth the die space.

I'm always amazed at the lack of other peoples' reading comprehension over the Internet.

OK, that was my word change, but the point stands. Weaknesses are for the most part edited out, unless the considerations that I stated apply. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the computer chip, but if something takes up space in an organism that means that it requires food to keep it going - either to power it or to carry it around - and so evolution tends towards maximum efficency.

 

[G-Max]

OK, that was my word change, but the point stands. Weaknesses are for the most part edited out, unless the considerations that I stated apply. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the computer chip, but if something takes up space in an organism that means that it requires food to keep it going - either to power it or to carry it around - and so evolution tends towards maximum efficency.

Not every weakness can be edited out. Doing so would require too many of the right mutations happening at the same time. A person born without the reptilian part of the brain wouldn't survive very long.

 

[Synobun]

It should be noted that Vulcans are not really emotionless beings in the Star trek canon. Vulcan emotions are actually stronger and more volatile than their human counterparts. The Vulcans work to suppress or purge their emotions because without such discipline they would all suffer from disorders like BPD.

Yeah. Without suppression, a Vulcan is very volatile emotionally, especially anger related. Their early history was spent constantly fighting. Also worth mentioning is their mating ritual, the Pon Farr.

 

[dIZZyBlIZZy]

underdiagnosis in rural areas. or overdiagnosis in urban ones.

key point is you dont go to no stinking psycho doctor in rural areas.




edit: wait, seriously the other way round? have any statistics?

I live in a rural area, and I go to the doctor as needed. As do most people who live in rural areas. I know the people in my area generally see a GP as needed for themselves, or children, etc etc.

 

[Synobun]

I live in a rural area, and I go to the doctor as needed. As do most people who live in rural areas. I know the people in my area generally see a GP as needed for themselves, or children, etc etc.

This. Now that I think about it, just about anyone in my rural region goes to the doctor at the slightest sign of illness, and the same goes for mental illness, while people in the city tend to ignore it. A lot of the city hospital numbers here are from rural living residents.

 

[Bootstoots]

Here's an interesting map showing suicide rates by county in the United States. It's very remarkable how high the rates are in the rural West, and many other rural areas as well. The most urban parts of the US, especially the Northeast and coastal California, have a very low suicide rate. It's pretty much the opposite of what most people seem to expect.

Source

 

[Kozmos]

While higher concentration of people leads easily to alienation the same prevents you from killing yourself so easily.

 

[Flying Pig]

Here's an interesting map showing suicide rates by county in the United States. It's very remarkable how high the rates are in the rural West, and many other rural areas as well. The most urban parts of the US, especially the Northeast and coastal California, have a very low suicide rate. It's pretty much the opposite of what most people seem to expect.

Source

Really? Rural areas draw their economy from farming, which is hard work, the success or complete failure of which is often subject to the whims of the gods. They also have relatively high rates of poverty and unemployment, a culture of machismo and keeping one's problems to oneself, and almost everyone keeps some sort of poison and a firearm around the house - I'm far from surpised that more people commit suicide in the country than in the cities.

 

[Miles Teg]

My mom's cat is bipolar.

It's a cat. How is that atypical?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Here's an interesting map showing suicide rates by county in the United States. It's very remarkable how high the rates are in the rural West, and many other rural areas as well. The most urban parts of the US, especially the Northeast and coastal California, have a very low suicide rate. It's pretty much the opposite of what most people seem to expect.

Source

The stats may be skewed by the large rural Indian population of the west where alcohol/suicide is an ongoing problem.

This is from Saturday's WSJ. It is a book review about how we make decisions and our lack of rationality.

Daniel Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, faced a problem...when he and his wife were debating whether to move from Berkeley, Calif., to Princeton, N.J. His wife claimed that people were less happy on the East Coast than in California; Mr. Kahneman thought this unlikely. But rather than just argue the point, he conducted a study. Sure enough, while most people in California—and elsewhere—believed that Californians were happier, Californians themselves reported being no more satisfied with their lives than people in Ohio and Michigan.

Why do people think Californians are happier than Ohioans? Because they focus on the most salient difference between the two places: climate. The "focusing illusion," according to Mr. Kahneman, happens when we call up a specific attribute of a thing or experience (e.g., climate) and use it to answer a broader and more difficult question (what makes life enjoyable, in California or anywhere else?).

Mr. Kahneman describes the California study and much else in "Thinking, Fast and Slow," a tour de force of psychological insight, research explication and compelling narrative that brings together in one volume the high points of Mr. Kahneman's notable contributions, over five decades, to the study of human judgment, decision-making and choice.