People who play sports end up with healthier parts of brain responsible for motor skills. This is a smaller, archaic part of the brain. Archaic brain parts are small but powerful with millions years of evolutions behind of them. Associative parts of the brains are younger, bigger, consume a lot of energy thus are difficult to feed. This is why it’s hard to think. Brain resists to consume too much energy, it takes any opportunity to procrastinate and so save the precious energy. Again millions years of evolution, during which species were most of the time hungry, are against consuming energy for no obvious gain. But it’s a good exercise for the circulatory system. People who exercise mental activity often outlive people who exercise physical activity.
People who play sports end up with healthier parts of brain responsible for motor skills. This is a smaller, archaic part of the brain. Archaic brain parts are small but powerful with millions years of evolutions behind of them. Associative parts of the brains are younger, bigger, consume a lot of energy thus are difficult to feed.
The human cerebral cortex holds only about 20% of all our neurons.
Aleksey Demakovsays:
I’ve seen your reference on facebook, to cite it:
“Remarkably, the human cerebral cortex, which represents 82% of brain mass, holds only 19% of all neurons in the human brain”
The fact that 19% of neurons are responsible for 82% of the brain mass tell a lot. There is a huge difference between neurons. Neurons are connected with each other through branches (axon and dendrites). So a neuron can have several thousand connections with other neurons (aka synapses). Absent these connections a neuron is just a body cell with its nucleus, organelle, cytoplasm, membrane. There is nothing special about it. Liver cells, for instance, have all the same. The network-like nature of the brain is what makes the difference. Memories (and perhaps thoughts) are not put into individual neurons. They are put into connections between them. Therefore just counting neurons without taking into account their interconnections and structure is taking a very narrow view of the subject. The volume, weight, blood supply (thus oxygen and glucose that is energy supply) of a given brain part are a much better proxy than the number of neurons it contains to estimate how hard it has to work.
Danny Castonguaysays:
I will enable my kids to play with the Oculus and other VR headsets because I think it will help them become skilled in using these powerful tools to solve more complex problems faster.
The startup idea I’m excited about is more around re-building old tools (e.g., spreadsheet software) to leverage speech and gesture recognize + VR to make sure faster at understanding, memorizing, and manipulating stuff in general (e.g., text, numbers, files, flow diagrams).
Andre Vellinosays:
I don’t know – I’ve been around long enough to be once-burned, twice-shy about VR. It goes in these “fad-cycles” – a bit like AI. I remember when VR was going to help us “fly” through mega-data analytics (I think I hear Bill Joy give a talk about that at BNR in ~ 1990) and help us better understand it. Wheat-fields of bar-graphs was the demo, as I remember it. I think you were right in the first place Daniel. Number theory, Graph theory, Probability theory… this will get you further, IMO.
I don’t know – I’ve been around long enough to be once-burned, twice-shy about VR. It goes in these “fad-cycles†– a bit like AI.
There is always a risk with any new technology that it will fail. There is still a risk that VR will be quickly forgotten once more. Maybe. But Sony is betting the farm on PlayStation VR right now and every report we got so far indicates that it does work well.
I remember when VR was going to help us “fly†through mega-data analytics (I think I hear Bill Joy give a talk about that at BNR in ~ 1990) and help us better understand it.
Instead we got smartphones. Sure. Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.
My point is that you have to make bets, or you only get to stay home and die of old age.
People who play sports end up with healthier parts of brain responsible for motor skills. This is a smaller, archaic part of the brain. Archaic brain parts are small but powerful with millions years of evolutions behind of them. Associative parts of the brains are younger, bigger, consume a lot of energy thus are difficult to feed. This is why it’s hard to think. Brain resists to consume too much energy, it takes any opportunity to procrastinate and so save the precious energy. Again millions years of evolution, during which species were most of the time hungry, are against consuming energy for no obvious gain. But it’s a good exercise for the circulatory system. People who exercise mental activity often outlive people who exercise physical activity.
People who play sports end up with healthier parts of brain responsible for motor skills. This is a smaller, archaic part of the brain. Archaic brain parts are small but powerful with millions years of evolutions behind of them. Associative parts of the brains are younger, bigger, consume a lot of energy thus are difficult to feed.
The human cerebral cortex holds only about 20% of all our neurons.
I’ve seen your reference on facebook, to cite it:
“Remarkably, the human cerebral cortex, which represents 82% of brain mass, holds only 19% of all neurons in the human brain”
The fact that 19% of neurons are responsible for 82% of the brain mass tell a lot. There is a huge difference between neurons. Neurons are connected with each other through branches (axon and dendrites). So a neuron can have several thousand connections with other neurons (aka synapses). Absent these connections a neuron is just a body cell with its nucleus, organelle, cytoplasm, membrane. There is nothing special about it. Liver cells, for instance, have all the same. The network-like nature of the brain is what makes the difference. Memories (and perhaps thoughts) are not put into individual neurons. They are put into connections between them. Therefore just counting neurons without taking into account their interconnections and structure is taking a very narrow view of the subject. The volume, weight, blood supply (thus oxygen and glucose that is energy supply) of a given brain part are a much better proxy than the number of neurons it contains to estimate how hard it has to work.
I will enable my kids to play with the Oculus and other VR headsets because I think it will help them become skilled in using these powerful tools to solve more complex problems faster.
The startup idea I’m excited about is more around re-building old tools (e.g., spreadsheet software) to leverage speech and gesture recognize + VR to make sure faster at understanding, memorizing, and manipulating stuff in general (e.g., text, numbers, files, flow diagrams).
I don’t know – I’ve been around long enough to be once-burned, twice-shy about VR. It goes in these “fad-cycles” – a bit like AI. I remember when VR was going to help us “fly” through mega-data analytics (I think I hear Bill Joy give a talk about that at BNR in ~ 1990) and help us better understand it. Wheat-fields of bar-graphs was the demo, as I remember it. I think you were right in the first place Daniel. Number theory, Graph theory, Probability theory… this will get you further, IMO.
I don’t know – I’ve been around long enough to be once-burned, twice-shy about VR. It goes in these “fad-cycles†– a bit like AI.
There is always a risk with any new technology that it will fail. There is still a risk that VR will be quickly forgotten once more. Maybe. But Sony is betting the farm on PlayStation VR right now and every report we got so far indicates that it does work well.
I remember when VR was going to help us “fly†through mega-data analytics (I think I hear Bill Joy give a talk about that at BNR in ~ 1990) and help us better understand it.
Instead we got smartphones. Sure. Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.
My point is that you have to make bets, or you only get to stay home and die of old age.