131–140 of 199 posts
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I definitely move through life seemingly in a mechanical fashion. I suspect in the wild I would be alert, all attention, always anticipating, planning.
in the wild I would be alert I am when I hike alone. Not super alert - since there are few dangerous animals in my country - but alert still. Also, you are very alert when you walk in bad neighbourhoods.
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From the article it indicates this shrinkage began 70K years ago, or 65K years before writing. In addition, vast majority of the population didn't know how to read or write until 100-150 years ago.
Maybe it’s just language in general. If I’m in a tribe with 100 people, and we all know to talk, not everyone needs to remember every single thing you might ever need. If you forget something, you can ask around, and probably someone remembers.
Until the second half of the last century it was hard for the majority of people to find enough food.
I would expect that our brain will start to grow slowly if food won't be a problem for a long period. The same way our bodies started to grow once we had enough food.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article it indicates this shrinkage began 70K years ago, or 65K years before writing. In addition, vast majority of the population didn't know how to read or write until 100-150 years ago.
I definitely move through life seemingly in a mechanical fashion. I suspect in the wild I would be alert, all attention, always anticipating, planning.
I suspect that some other factor is responsible for the shrinkage. It could just be pure sexual selection. Maybe we find smaller more symmetrical heads to be more attractive and we sexually selected for them over tens of thousands of years. Also could be responsible for domesticated animal brain shrinkage, as we select for more attractive animals.
Could it be true that our brains got more complex even as they got smaller or did we legitimately lose some IQ points from the shrinkage?
It seems like the majority of the comments are not taking into account that this trend began approximately 70,000 years ago - slightly before the various things people here are blaming such as TikTok, Google, writing, Javascript and Twitter. Cutting-edge (heh) technology 70,000 years ago was the stone blade as well as the earliest known primitive art. An interesting guide whenever you're trying to put this kind of th…
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I wish I could upvote this more. I would be willing to bet a number of such comments did not even read the article and responding based on impulse with their gripe about modern society du-jour.
The HN rule about not being able to ask if someone read the article or imply/suggest that they did not is the worst rule on the site, because it encourages this behaviour :(
It seems like the majority of the comments are not taking into account that this trend began approximately 70,000 years ago - slightly before the various things people here are blaming such as TikTok, Google, writing, Javascript and Twitter. Cutting-edge (heh) technology 70,000 years ago was the stone blade as well as the earliest known primitive art. An interesting guide whenever you're trying to put this kind of th…
Clearly they mean that TikTok is so bad it's actually shrunken our ancestors' brains posthumously.
Although our brains were getting bigger progressively, around 70,000 years ago they plateaued, and have been shrinking ever since. John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, explains how, over the last 20,000 years alone, human brains have shrunk from 1,500 cubic centimeters (cc) to 1,350 cc, roughly the size of a tennis ball. Except this requires extrapolating brain volume from the skull , which p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could upvote this more. I would be willing to bet a number of such comments did not even read the article and responding based on impulse with their gripe about modern society du-jour.
The HN rule about not being able to ask if someone read the article or imply/suggest that they did not is the worst rule on the site, because it encourages this behaviour :(
It's the offensive part that's not encouraged here - and I dig that.