Читать книгу The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting - Арсен Аветисов - Страница 18

What really matters is what happens in us, not with us.

An average person’s primitive reaction – the time it takes from seeing the light in front of their eyes to pressing a button in response – is 250 milliseconds. An average computer responds 750,000,000 times faster. But this indicator does not mean anything if you think about the overall capabilities of our brain and what a talented economist and an unsurpassed designer nature is.

Imagine a piece of thin fabric 2—3 millimetres thick with sides slightly longer than 40 cm. And in this piece of conditional matter, there are about 18 billion nerve cells. This is the cerebral cortex. Is it too many or too few? For comparison, the brain itself contains about 90 billion cells. At first glance, the figure of 18 billion looks solid. But if we take into account that there are almost 4 times more cells in the cerebellum, we can conclude that it is more important for a person to walk smoothly and not to fall than to write poems or compose formulas.

But not everything is perfect in the work of these 18 billion cells. Mental activity, too, has certain limitations – a person can simultaneously focus on only one problem and operate with three aspects of this problem. But this is not the most important thing. What matters, as always, is the energy involved. In the living world, to solve the problem of energy replenishment, its own 'food chains’ are built. People have optimised this process and began to literally grow energy in the fields and breed it on farms.

To meet their other 'requirements’ and 'concepts’, people needed different forms of energy, which they began to extract from the bowels of the Earth, generate at power stations, using the force of moving water or split atoms, and build new 'food chains’ now at the level of interests of entire states and consortia.

The average brain weight is about 2 per cent of the body weight, while it consumes a disproportionate amount of energy – 20 per cent and more. If we present the data in a more familiar absolute form, then the power consumption of our brain processor is slightly more than 12 watts. It is difficult to imagine how much power a computer would need if it had the same functionality as our brain.

The brain never rests, even when a person is asleep. It takes about 350—400 calories a day to maintain brain function, mostly in the form of glucose. The peak of energy consumption by the brain occurs at the age of 5—6 years, when the brain is able to utilise up to 60 per cent of all the energy received by the body.

In the evening, energy consumption is significantly higher than in the morning. This is because as the day’s experiences accumulate, cells and especially intercellular junctions have to expend more energy and conduct signals more actively. Impressions are stored, categorised, catalogued, and transformed into a person’s experience. Ultimately, all this changes the architecture of connections between nerve cells.

During its work, the brain is able to redirect blood to its certain areas, and spikes in energy consumption occur in these areas. This happens when the areas are involved in solving complex cognitive tasks – tasks for which there are no previously learned patterns in the memory, for example, learning a new skill, playing an instrument, or learning a language of a completely different language group. Such spikes can also occur when conditions are constantly changing, for example, in planning a strategy in a game of chess.

With the mastery of the skill and the accumulated experience of its application, a person no longer needs a high level of diligence and concentration. And, consequently, much less energy is consumed. How significant are these seemingly minor spikes in consumption for the brain? And, most importantly, why is the body willing to pay such a high price for brain function – such a substantial amount of energy?

It all started a long time ago. It is at present that people, with certain reservations, have practically solved the problem of hunger. But for millions of years, our human ancestors have constantly faced the threat of starvation. Nevertheless, the body allocates a fifth of its energy consumed to the needs of the brain.

The issue of energy conservation is a matter of strategy for its consumption. The brain is constantly involved in optimising all the processes related to the use of this energy. It is not just the processes of the brain itself, but also those that consume the remaining four-fifths of the energy. The energy of a person’s activity, reactions, actions, and behaviour. Optimisation follows a simple and reliable strategy – why reinvent the wheel every time? – it is more economical to use ready-made solutions or patterns. The main thing is that such patterns already exist or, if necessary, are created and memorised.

People never think about the many activities they perform every day. Even the simplest ones. They brush their teeth, make coffee, and drive a car. But how much time and energy do they spend learning these skills? A person has a giant library of such templates, and it is difficult to say how much energy has been spent to optimise and organise these seemingly simple but necessary actions in his or her head.

There are also actions and processes that we are merely not aware of. The founder of the so-called default mode of brain function, Markus Raichle, explains that the brain is constantly busy building an internal model of the world around it. The model created by the brain acts as a forecast and helps predict and prepare for events. While the predictions come true, the brain does not attract the person’s attention, which would be much more energy-consuming.

But if something happens that does not correspond to the forecast, the person will certainly pay attention to it. For example, if you step on the steps of an escalator that is not working, you suddenly feel something like a jolt. According to the brain’s prediction, which has been confirmed a hundred times, the escalator should work, and the brain compensates in advance for the acceleration that the body experiences when it gets on the escalator.

Any changes are an incredible expenditure of energy. The simplicity of transformations, which people are assured of in childhood, which they dream of in their youth, and which they meet when they are mature, this simplicity becomes unbearable for people. It repels them when they learn the value of this so-called simplicity.

After all, in the end, for the sake of change, you always need to get rid of something, sacrifice something and rebuild something. Or, even more critically, build from scratch. And in fact, only the brain can conceive how much energy will have to be spent on this. One form of earning energy is saving energy. Changing yourself is expensive.

People claim to be lazy and content with their status, providing various explanations and citing potential difficulties or clearly unsolvable problems. The imagined difficulties per se serve as a convenient excuse for their lack of action.

People are not willing to pay for changes, but they cannot admit it to themselves. It is not necessarily people themselves who are against change, but rather their brain’s resistance to it. The visual cortex, the area of the brain responsible for imagination and mental visualisation, consumes so much energy that a person is not even capable of imagining it. This is also one of the reasons why people are not inclined to think about or consider something unless they absolutely have to.

Depending on the willingness to spend energy on thoughts about what is happening around them and in decreasing order of this readiness, people can be divided into three groups: those who manage what is happening, those who observe what is happening, and those who are surprised by what is happening.

Hence, if you encounter someone who is constantly surprised, then they are not ready to change anything that surprises them. Patient observation demands more energy, and creation and management are the height of waste. However, it is precisely this energy waste that drives human development.