Читать книгу Noises from the Darkroom: The Science and Mystery of the Mind - Guy Claxton - Страница 26

No amount of genetic adaptation can prepare you for the unpredictable. The world is always liable to change in unprecedented ways, and the animal that is not completely pre-set, but which comes with the facility to tune itself to new environmental frequencies as they come on air, has a head start over one that was built on the assumption that its world would last for ever. The ability of an individual to learn a new pattern, and a new trick to cope with it, is, one of the most amazing discoveries of evolution, but it needs, if it is to work, adequate resourcing.

This is the second good reason for having a brain. A nervous system intricate enough to co-ordinate a wide range of pressures and resources makes a good basis for the next great evolutionary jump: incorporating a degree of flexibility into these interconnections, so that the way they are wired up can (within limits) respond to the success of the system in promoting the individual’s (and her children’s) survival. If it is useful to be born knowing what to do when you see a snake, it is even more useful to be able to record the kinds of situations in which you personally have met snakes before, and to be able recognize a fresh trail, and the distinctive way the grass moves. From the point of view of this book, the brain will be the most interesting of the body’s intelligent subsystems precisely because it is the one that is tuned so comprehensively by experience—and therefore by culture. Muscles and antibodies too are affected by what happens to them, but to nothing like the same extraordinary extent.