The large size of the human brain is what makes us (arguably) the most intelligent creatures on Earth, but new research surprisingly reveals our brains may have been slowly shrinking from about 3,000 years ago. Are we getting less smart? Scientists aren’t ready to declare that yet, but have found a possible answer for the brain size mystery by studying ants and the use of collective intelligence in their social organizations.

Smaller Brain = Less Intelligence?

Researchers have found that for much of human evolutionary history our brains kept growing. In fact, if you count from our last shared ancestors with chimpanzees six million years ago, the human brain size almost quadrupled. This happened thanks in part to the improving diet and nutrition of early humans. Cro Magnons, the Homo sapiens that had the largest brains in history were alive from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. But as the <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full">recent study </a>from scientists at Dartmouth and Boston Universities points out, around 3,000 years ago, our brains began to diminish.

The Size Of Our Brain Through History

<a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking">Previous research </a>estimated that, over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human brain went from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350 cc — shrinking by about 150 cc, or 10% (the size of a tennis ball, as commentators have <a href="https://www.npr.org/2011/01/02/132591244/our-brains-are-shrinking-are-we-getting-dumber">pointed out </a>)."Most people are aware that humans have unusually large brains—significantly larger than predicted from our body size. In our deep evolutionary history, human brain size dramatically increased," <a href="https://phys.org/news/2021-10-human-brains-decrease-size-years.html">said </a>the new study’s other co-author James Traniello, of Boston University. "The reduction in human brain size was unexpected."

Our Brain Was Always Growing And Growing. And Then It Stopped. 

The big question of course is, “Why is our evolution going in reverse?". The interdisciplinary research team, which included a biological anthropologist, a behavioral ecologist and an evolutionary neurobiologist, <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full">write in the study </a>that their dating techniques do not ” support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication.”

Why Did Our Brains Start Shrinking? Here’s Why They Didn’t. 

The scientists believe that the reason we don’t need the same size brains lies in <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/the-reason-why-social-media-makes-us-act-like-rats">the creation of our social systems </a>, which favor distributed gathering and sharing of knowledge and information while offering advantages in “group-level decision-making.” Since brains use a lot of energy, being able to draw upon the knowledge gathered within a larger society would require less individual brain energy to be expended in order to store and process information. Thus a smaller brain would be able to do the job just as well.

So, Why Did Our Brains Start Shrinking?

Interestingly, the researchers also suggest that the advent of writing around 5,000 years ago likely had a pronounced effect on the “neural architectures” of individual human brains by increasing the power of group cognition. Decision-making by an increasingly interconnected group could have led to “adaptive group responses exceeding the cognitive accuracy and speed of individual decisions and had a fitness consequence.” This could have led to the human brain size decrease “as a consequence of metabolic cost savings.”

But What Was The Start Of It All?

Unexpectedly, the researchers arrived at their conclusions by studying ants. As the scientists write in their <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full">paper </a>, “Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence.” While understanding the historical forces affecting brain evolution in humans is a complex undertaking, with only the fossil record to use for evidence, the researchers <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/this-parasite-offers-ants-longer-lives-but-youth-comes-with-a-price">looked at ant communities </a>.

And What Brought About That Idea?

“The remarkable ecological diversity of ants and their species richness <a href="https://interestingengineering.com/the-complex-engineering-of-underground-ant-cities">encompasses forms convergent in aspects of human sociality</a>, including large group size, agrarian life histories, division of labor, and collective cognition,” explain the scientists in the <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.742639/full">study </a>. The range of social systems in ant societies allowed them to test out hypotheses and come up with insights that provide a general look at how selective forces can affect brain size.

Ant Sociality And Human Sociality

The research team focused specifically on creating computational models that represent patterns of worker ant brain size and energy use, looking at groups of Oecophylla weaver ants, Atta leafcutter ants, and the common garden ant Formica. What they found is that collective intelligence and division of labor had an effect on the variation in brain sizes. In a group with shareable knowledge and individual specialization in particular tasks, brains were likely to adapt for the sake of efficiency, consequently diminishing in size.

Division Of Labour Affects Brain Size

"Ant and human societies are very different and have taken different routes in social evolution," <a href="https://phys.org/news/2021-10-human-brains-decrease-size-years.html">Traniello shared</a>. "Nevertheless, ants also share with humans important aspects of social life such as group decision-making and division of labor, as well as the production of their own food (agriculture). These similarities can broadly inform us of the factors that may influence changes in human brain size."

Ants Are Not Humans, Of Course

While this research doesn’t have definitive answers on what affected the changing volume of our brains, the new modeling is a fascinating step forward in getting closer to a fuller picture of our evolutionary transformation.

A Fascinating Step Forward

The human brain shrank in size about 3,000 years ago. Scientists may have found an explanation by studying ants.

Scientists may have found an explanation for the surprising decrease in human brain size about 3,000 years ago by studying ants.

Can Collective Intelligence Be the Reason Why Human Brains Are Shrinking?

Your attention determines:<ul><li>what you perceive, learn, and remember;</li><li>how steady or how reactive you feel;</li><li>which decisions you make and actions you take;</li><li>how you interact with others</li><li>your sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. </li></ul>No matter how much I tell you about how attention works and why, and no matter how motivated you are, the way your brain pays attention cannot be fundamentally altered by sheer force of will

Introduction

<ul><li>Attention simultaneously highlights what’s important and dims distractions so we can think deeply, problem-solve, plan, prioritize, and innovate</li><li>It threads together the moment-by-moment colors, flavors, textures, insights, memories, emotions, decisions, and actions that create the fabric of our lives</li><li>What you pay attention to is your life</li></ul>

Attention Is Your Superpower

<ul><li>attention biases brain activity. It gives a competitive advantage to the information it selects. Whatever it is you pay attention to will have more neural activity associated with it. Your attention, quite literally, alters the functioning of your brain at the cellular level. It truly is a superpower.</li></ul>

(continue)

The Flashlight<ul><li>Where you focus to, that point become clearer. Other than that point, become suppressed. Like a flashlight</li><li>Called orienting system</li></ul>The Floodlight<ul><li>Opposite of flashlight, this subsystem is broad and open. Your attention is ready for any input within your vision</li><li>Called alerting system</li></ul>The Juggler <ul><li>To direct, oversee, and manage what we’re doing, moment to moment, as well as ensure that our actions are aligned with what we’re aiming to do </li><li>This is the overseer that makes sure we stay on track</li><li>Called central executive</li></ul>

3 Brain Subsystems 

<ul><li>Attention never vanishes, even though it might feel as if it does when you’re struggling to focus and simply can’t</li><li>The amount of attention you have remains constant. It just gets used differently, and maybe not how you want it to be used</li><li>You always use 100 percent of your attention. Attention always goes somewhere. So the question becomes: Where?</li></ul>

Load Theory: Attention Is Not A Gas Tank

Any tasks you do over a period of time:<ul><li>Performance declines</li><li>Errors goes up</li><li>Response becomes slower and more variable</li></ul>

The Vigilance Decrement

<ol><li>Get ready, sit in an upright alerted posture, shoulder back chest open and be comfortable.</li><li>Tune in to the breath related sensation, imagine the air entering your lung as you breathe in slowly, and exit your lung as you breathe out</li><li>Notice when your mind wander and focus back to the breathing exercises. It's normal to wander and always use constructive words when trying to refocus</li></ol>

Core Practice: Find Your Focus

<ul><li>When we try to do two things at once that both require our attention, it’s really hard to do either of them well</li><li>Think of it this way: You only have one flashlight. Not two. Not three. And your one flashlight can only ever be shining at one thing at a time</li><li>When you’re trying to accomplish multiple tasks at once that require your focused attention, what you’re actually doing is moving your flashlight from one thing, then to the next, then back to the first</li></ul>

Don't Multitask

To get a sense of what this means for your cognition, imagine a studio apartment. There is only one room. Every time you want to use the room, you have to completely change out the furniture. Want to sleep? Set up a bed and nightstand. Want to host a party? Take down the bedroom and set up couches and coffee tables. Need to cook? Drag that all away and set up a stove, counter, and cooking supplies. Sound exhausting? It is! And it’s the same for your cognition, when you switch from task to task.

Multitasking Metaphor

<ul><li>Working memory is where you hold the micro-intentions and deliberate aim of having a desired outcome for each and every task you engage in</li><li>All the decisions, planning, thinking, actions, and behaviors you do over the course of a day: anything you set out to do</li><li>You lean on your working memory to maintain your goals and subgoals, update them, and scrap them for a different goal, on a continuous, moment-by-moment, task-by-task basis.</li><li>Hold a goal in mind, and then take action based on that goal. That’s how working memory works, and also why it impacts you so profoundly</li></ul>

Working Memory

Working memory is the essential partner to attention: it’s what allows you to actually do something with the information your flashlight focuses on. But if attention keeps piping in salient and distracting content, that will become a big problem for goal maintenance, let alone goal accomplishment. Why? Because you only have so much space to work with. Just like a real-life whiteboard, your working memory has limits

Continue

The flashlight encodes information and maintains it in working memory, “retracing” it on the whiteboard to keep it there for longer. — Key vulnerability: Bait and SwitchWhen your attention is automatically “captured” or yanked by something salient, this more exciting (to your attention) content overwrites what was being maintained. Voluntary attention then starts retracing this new content. The prior information is lost forever, gone without a trace.

The Flashlight

The floodlight gains access to the whiteboard to accomplish an urgent goal. Under acute threat or stress, your alerting system temporarily blocks access to working memory to ensure that your brain’s action systems prioritize basic survival behaviors (fight, flight, freeze) over any other goals or plans. — Key vulnerability: Road BlockThe alerting system can be set off by feelings of threat, even when there is no real danger. This temporarily cuts off access to working memory and impairs any functions that rely on it (like long-term memory, social connection, and emotion regulation).

The Floodlight

The juggler keeps your current goals active on the whiteboard, and updates these goals as circumstances change. — Key vulnerability: Ball DropOverload, blanking, and distraction in working memory all derail the central executive’s juggler, leading to lost goals and misguided behaviors. The juggler drops the ball.

The Juggler

1. Repeat the previous steps. We begin the same way we did with the basic Find Your Flashlight (find where your thoughts focus on), by sitting in a chair, comfortable but upright, resting your hands in your lap, and closing or lowering your eyes (to limit visual distraction). Again, select prominent breath-related sensations. Remember the metaphor of your attention as a flashlight, the beam pointing toward your selected breath-related body sensation. When your flashlight drifts to something else . . .

CORE PRACTICE BOOSTER: WATCH YOUR WHITEBOARD

2. Notice where it goes. This is a new step! In the first exercise, I asked you to notice if attention wandered away, and if so to immediately move your flashlight back to your breath. This time, I want you to pause for a moment and observe where the flashlight is now directed.

3. Give it a label. Identify what type of distraction has appeared on your whiteboard. Is it a thought, an emotion, or a sensation? A thought could be a worry, a reminder, a memory, an idea, an item on your to-do list. An emotion could be a feeling of frustration, an urge to stop doing the practice and do something else, a twinge of happiness, a swell of stress. A sensation is something in your physical body: An itch. A sore muscle. Noticing that your back hurts from sitting there, or noticing something you heard, smelled, touched, or saw (such as a door slamming, food cooking, cat jumping).

4. Make this a quick process. Notice if you begin going down a rabbit hole of elaborating on the distraction, or asking why you are thinking about this particular topic, or defaulting to unsupportive habits like chastising yourself for getting distracted in the first place. It is not your job right now to answer these questions or reprimand yourself. Now is actually the time to notice what is on your whiteboard but not to engage with it. Just label the contents as best you can from these three categories: thought, emotion, sensation. And then . . .

5. Move on. Come back to the present moment, back to your breath, after every instance of labeling. If it’s a strong experience, it might pop up repeatedly—then just label it again.

6. Repeat. Each time you notice yourself mind-wandering, tag the content of your mind-wandering (as thought, emotion, or sensation) and then come back to your breath.

your memory for experiences, involves selective encoding of only those aspects of experience that were most attended to and held in working memory. Translation: you’ll only remember what you focused on and “wrote” on your whiteboard—not everything that occurred. And further, your episodic memory doesn’t merely involve the external aspects of events (who, what, where, and so forth) but is deeply wrapped up in your autobiographical take on what you experienced. So—was the experience happy? Sad? Interesting? Tense? Your emotional experience will influence what you focus on.

Episodic Memory

your general world knowledge, for facts, ideas, concepts—is similarly selective. What you remember is based on what else you’ve previously learned.

Semantic Memory

How to train your attention and be more productive

STOP FOR A MOMENT. Are you here right now? Is your focus on this page? Or is it roaming elsewhere, to the past or future, to a worry, to your to-do list, or to your phone? Whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can’t seem to manage to hang on to your attention. No matter how hard you try, you’re somewhere else. The consequence is that you miss out on 50 percent of your life—including the most important moments. The good news: There’s nothing wrong with you—your brain isn’t broken. The human brain was built to be distractible. The even better news: You can train your brain to pay attention more effectively. Stay with me a little longer and soon you will be able to: Focus without all the struggle. Take back your attention from the pull of distraction. And function at your peak, for all that truly matters in your life.

Power

Peak Mind

I am a pothead and I found this to be interesting. Old but interesting.

Marijuana does have benefits whether people choose to believe it or not!

If you’re convinced that you become #blessed with night vision superpowers after smoking a spliff, you’re not alone. In fact, new research proves that marijuana actually improves eyesight. According…

420 Friendly Ideas

Good News For Potheads: Smoking Weed Helps You See Better In The Dark

Study suggests high levels of skunk use may affect the brain’s white matter, making communication between the right and left hemispheres less efficient.

How Smoking Skunk Damage Nerve Fibres

Study suggests high levels of skunk use may affect the brain’s white matter, making communication between the right and left hemispheres less efficient

Smoking high-strength cannabis may damage nerve fibres in brain | Drugs

Oxytocin is often known as ‘the bonding hormone’. It’s released when we feel safe, connected, and close to people we trust.Oxytocin hacks to stimulate naturally-<ul><li>Stroking a pet, interacting with animals lovingly </li><li>Being in close company of friends and family and being affectionate </li><li>Giving compliments </li><li>Holding hands</li><li>Giving or receiving massage (scalp massage)</li><li>Preparing and sharing food with loved ones </li></ul>

Oxytocin 

Serotonin is most commonly associated with mood regulation, balanced sleeping patterns, improving happiness and decreasing anxiety.Serotonin hacks to stimulate naturally-<ul><li>Getting some sun enjoying the warmth of sun on your eyelids can greatly enhance mood and also help to boost your levels of Vitamin D.</li><li>Aerobic exercise such a running, swimming or cycling helps to release Tryptophan in to the bloodstream which is then converted in to Serotonin</li><li>Getting out for a walk in nature. Try escaping the city for a leafy country or woodland walk</li></ul>

Serotonin

Dopamine is the reward hormone that is organically released from things like praise, positive outcomes, winning and food.Dopamine hacks to stimulate naturally - <ul><li>Eating your favourite foods as a treat (in moderation )</li><li>Having gratitude for the little wins in life</li><li>Practicing self care </li><li>Listening to feel-good music </li><li>Finishing a task or project you started </li><li>Break bigger tasks into smaller parts and deliberately reward yourself internally each time you complete the smaller task</li></ul>

Dopamine 

Endorphin is heavily involved in the fight or flight response and is actually a natural pain. It helps manage pain, reduce stress and increase pleasure.Endorphin hacks to stimulate naturally - <ul><li>Exercise</li><li>Laughing with friends, watching/listening to comedy </li><li>Being creative through art or design, gardening or anything that gets your juices flowing</li><li>Aromatherapy oils like rosemary, lavender, citrus etc</li></ul>

Endorphin

Happiness chemicals and how to hack them  I think it's fair to say that we would all like to be more happy. Whilst we can agree on that, I'm sure we can also all agree that happiness is fleeting and something that comes and goes. In this blog post we are delving into the chemicals we know from science that help to prod

brainscience

Smaller Brain = Less Intelligence?

Can Collective Intelligence Be the Reason Why Human Brains Are Shrinking?

Introduction

Peak Mind

Good News For Potheads: Smoking Weed Helps You See Better In The Dark