Our human brain defaults to the path of least resistance.
Our brains operate on about 20 watts of power. A candle operates on about 80 watts. An AI data center consumes about 1 billion watts..
Our energetic brain power is, by contrast, equivalent to a dim bulb. We shouldn't flatter ourselves. We're not all that bright.
At the same time, it's highly efficient. Most of our functions are handled by our autonomic nervous system which operates through unconscious processes. Even what we call our conscious behavior is mostly reflex and habit, so while we can be aware of its operation and intervene with some conscious control, nearly all we do requires very little thinking. If you've caught yourself in the kitchen mindlessly snacking you've experienced this.
Last week, I encouraged us to lean into winning friends. I have to confess, I'm not being fair when I make this expectation. There's a cognitive cost to engaging other humans. Doing the work of discerning another, deriving meaning from how they present and behave, and tracking the dynamism that's inherent from an ever learning, ever changing being. Throwing the light of understanding on another with the dim bulb of our cognitive process is hard work.
Our othering in the form of stereotyping -- which literally means casting an image in metal -- is our brain's way of reducing the amount of thinking we need to do. It reduces the load on the dim bulb of our conscious awareness.
The most pronounced form of this I've found is an island in the Bay of Bengal where the inhabitants have a practice of immediately killing any stranger they find on their island. It doesn't seem to matter if the stranger made a deliberate approach or an accidental landing. News reports suggest this response is considered extreme, but my regional governmental entity, Vermont, has precedent that I can kill someone who enters my house without permission. Very little thinking required. I'm struggling to understand how it would be different from the islanders' response.
In this forum, I'm not going to make a moral claim for thinking harder.
Openness, discernment, interpretation, and evaluation leading to judgment are higher level thinking processes taxing to those 20 watts. Nonetheless, they are the processes beyond the reach of machine learning. People will continue to add value through this kind of thinking.
That is, the people who take it on will. There's a troubling report recently published by Yale neurologists that finds "from a 10-year study, U.S. adults reported growing rates of problems with their memory, concentration, and decision-making abilities, with the figure doubling among the youngest cohort."
It doesn't suggest a cause. At the same time, memory, concentration, and decision-making abilities improve with use. Openness, discernment, interpretation, and evaluation are effective brain exercises. An excellent way to exercise them is to engage other people -- especially difficult ones.
Maybe you'll win a friend in the process.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper