How to Make Smaller Brains

I’ll give you some insight into my thought process.

I’ve spent most of the morning reading weight-loss studies, learning (among other things) that if you give women at Curves more food than they can burn off, they’ll still lose weight and body fat, and will have reduced waist sizes.

These were obese, sedentary women whose resting energy expenditure was measured at about 1,300 calories a day, on average. They were fed 2,600 calories a day, 55% of which was carbohydrate. And if I’m reading the tables correctly, they still lost, on average, about 7 pounds in 14 weeks … while doing a Curves workout program.

Amazing.

Even more amazing: Some of the other women in the study, who were allegedly eating just 1,200 calories a day, gained weight. (Let’s be adults and admit that it’s hard as hell for anyone to eat 1,200 calories a day for any length of time.) 

But after a few hours of this kind of reading my eyes glazed over, so I wandered around the web to find something fun to read. First I read this, about how the Australian healthcare system works. It was an informative and straightforward summary of a complex topic, with some bonus entertainment value:

[S]ome drugs pose particular issues. Viagra, for instance, is not delivered at subsidy through the health care system (for obvious reasons). But you can get subsidized Viagra if you have certain medical conditions (paraplegia being the important one). I kid you not that there have been minor problems with paraplegics dealing in Viagra.

I’d pay to see that movie. It would have to be more entertaining than Born on the Fourth of July.

I began to wonder why we can’t have more of this in our media. Why does the entire healthcare debate come down to one side making up stupid shit and breaking Godwin’s law, while the other side smugly refutes the blatant falsehoods without actually helping anyone understand the big picture?

So my next thought was, are humans becoming measurably stupider?

That’s how I ended up reading this article in New Scientist, about how human evolution gave us such big brains in the first place. The biggest factor:

Some 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors’ brains expanded from a mere 600 cubic centimetres to about a litre. Two new studies suggest it is no fluke that this brain boom coincided with the onset of an ice age. Cooler heads, it seems, allowed ancient human brains to let off steam and grow.

Since the change in global temperatures was relatively slight, there’s an obvious corollary:

If global cooling allowed humans to evolve their big brains, will today’s global warming take them away again? “I’d hate to think that a difference of 1.5 degrees C might mean the end of humans because our brains cook,” says George Middendorf of Howard University in Washington DC, “but I guess it’s a scenario that might play out.”

It probably won’t, though, thanks to what those big human brains made possible: culture.

“When culture comes in, it layers itself on top of the biological constraints,” says Tyler Volk, an Earth-systems expert at New York University. Thanks to culture and technology, we now have ways of buffering ourselves against hot climates, not only with air conditioning, but also with basic tools such as fans, thick-walled buildings and reservoirs to ensure we have plenty of water.

Only one thing could destroy that buffer – a total breakdown of society.

So if it all falls apart, not even Mad Max could protect us from the end result of our willful ignorance.

Tags: Tags: healthcare, human brain, intelligence, Weight Loss