Neuroscience

Just as a matter of interest, I was reading a book about the brain (“Human: The science behind what makes your brain unique,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga) and I was reading that what makes up the entirety of our larger than usual brains is an extremely large neocortex: a hedgehog neocortex takes up 16% of its brain, a Galago’s (a small monkey) neocortex takes up 46%, and a human’s neocortex is 76%!

What makes this interesting is that the neocortex is where “sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language” occur.

I found this fascinating because much of that has to do with perception of the actual, sensate world. Our brains started to prioritize sensately attending to the world and seems to have created a feedback-runaway wherein larger brain-size begat greater evolutionary success, and this brain-size (really just neocortex-size!) growth continued even despite making human childbirth a dicey process.

This could be reworded as: greater sensory-perception priority led to greater evolutionary success.

This reminded me of how Richard talks about life tending toward the actual, toward the best outcome… matching the actual world is naturally-automatically fed with success.

So in a funny way we humans are in a half-step of evolution - we have these big neocortexes, we’re no longer running on pure instinct, but the majority of us are not free.

Reading this really gave me the impression that becoming free is the most straightforward thing to happen, it’s almost like a matter of time for this species.