I like listening to smart people. No matter the topic (mostly), it’s always worthwhile to listen even if you don’t understand everything they’re talking about. If you always understood everything, where is the growth?
StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson – The Science of the Mind
Some highlights from this particular episode.
- Putting lesions on the brain helped with OCD. Umwhut.
- I bet all of these guys were picked on in school, look at them now.
- Ultimately, we don’t know how anything in the brain works.
The most spectacular observation, in my opinion, was Tyson’s point at the end. You can see it starting at around the 25min mark and continuing till the end. To paraphrase… Advanced primates are approximately 1% different in DNA to us. Yet, the smartest primate is roughly the equivalent of a human toddler. So then to look at it from the perspective of a potential “higher intelligence” such as humans from the future, or aliens, or “gods”. They might be only 1% different than us, but the SMARTEST human would only be roughly the equivalent of one of their toddlers.
Let that sink in for a second, and it puts a few things in perspective.