Myth: Evolution will help grow a better student brain
This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)
Employing evolution
Some smart people believe that evolution will help improve the brain to tolerate some of the challenges of the modern world. They are right. The evolution is an on-going process. However, the same smart people may tend to believe that pushing the brain to its limits has some evolutionary value. This thinking is extremely dangerous as it may justify the displeasure of learning in contradiction to the fundamental law of learning.
The claim is that we need to adapt to harder schooling because there are things that our grandmothers could never do. However, school stress is more likely to come from calculus that have been done since the time of Newton, i.e. long before granny was born. At the same time, our grandmothers never used iPhone, which kids love and schools often ban or place in cell hotels.
The idea of pushing the limits leads parents and educators to believe that exposing kids to hardships of life early will result in building resilience. Developmental acceleration that comes from hardship provide further feedback to the illusion that it benefits the brain. This is how the whole system of harmful ideas come to play: cram schools, alarm clocks, jam-packed educational and extracurricular schedules, accelerated curriculum, boot camps and brain boot camps, and more.
This is all based on poor understanding of evolution.
For starters, evolution is a snail-slow process that takes generations to produce changes that are hard to notice. Why rely on evolution, when we can get results on a few orders of magnitude better by taking the opposite strategy: relieving the pressures. Take an average school-age kid, let it get some sleep, let it relax, activate the learn drive, let him follow the natural creativity cycle, and in a few months you may get 500% gain in brain power. Don't Google to verify the number. 500% is just my wild shot. I look at unhappy gaunt kids around and I know that what they crave for is their best medicine: freedom, incl. freedom to learn.
Genius of neural computation
There is a dangerous point of ignorance behind the idea that pushing the limits is good for the evolution of the brain. At the root of the error in judgement is the unawareness of evolutionary marvels such as the learn drive, memory optimization in sleep, spaced repetition, and more. These are genius inventions of neural computing that cannot be improved using the concept of pushing the limits of brainwork.
Amazingly, many scientists in service of the army, education system, or the industry already work on weapons of mass brain destruction. Millions of dollars keep getting invested in harmful ideas such as eliminating sleep, eliminating forgetting, eliminating creative distraction, manipulating sleep stages, etc.
This would actually result in evolution in reverse! If we eliminate sleep, we kill intelligence. If we eliminate sleepiness, we kill memory optimization. If we eliminate the sense of boredom, we accept indiscriminate learning. If we eliminate forgetting, we kill abstract thinking, and so on.
Moreover, all the push for bad sleep and bad learning would result in an epidemic of Alzheimer's disease. The garbage leftovers of excessive brainwork usually hit beyond the breeding age. This keeps senile dementia well protected from the reach of the evolution. Instead of having smarter students, we would have adults who would forget their own name by the time they were of my age.
Breeding perfect students
It is a dream of every teacher to have an obedient, focused, and refreshed student who comes to school in time. Unfortunately, that dream is often realized with harmful means. Alarm clock ensures good timing. Modafinil improves alertness. Ritalin improves focus. Legal amphetamine, Adderall, improves both. Learned helplessness leads to obedience. Instead of raising creative individuals, with this approach, we are raising intellectual zombies.
Coercive education is supposed to make sure kids tolerate boredom in order to withstand the hardships of learning. Teen suicide would be a form of natural selection of those who did not adapt to "modern lifestyle". Supposedly, the next generation is to get more resilient. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. If we tolerate boredom, frustration, and suppress the distractive learn drive, we eliminate the natural inflow of coherent knowledge, and replace it with indiscriminate inflow of knowledge that does not fit the semantic network status quo. This would naturally accelerate forgetting, which might perhaps be slowed down with drugs. One day this will inevitably spark a saying: "he is a great student, he knows a lot, but he is as dumb as a hard disk".
Due to the marvelous diversification of student interests, joy of learning is a frequent source of distraction in a classroom. While the teacher might be ready to explain the structure of the atom, the kid is more likely to think about that new cool videogame. To eliminate that distraction we need to eliminate the learn drive (the attractive force) and creativity (the distractive force). Ritalin does a great job here. It makes sure that passions do not interfere with schooling.
Enjoying videogames, TV shows, or the need to spend 7 hours per day on sleep are just side effects of genius inventions of neural evolution. Those great evolutionary spoils cannot be overturned. They are also hard to improve upon in computational sense. They are an acme of millions of years of evolution. Pushing the brain to the limits is like trying to improve bird flight by loading birds with weights that make flight impossible.
I wrote elsewhere that resistance to chronic stress is not trainable. By pushing the limits early, we may induce brain adaptations that are shortcuts in development, but bring negative long-term outcomes. Daycare acceleration is the best example of pushing the limits that might spark evolution in the reverse, i.e. dumbing up future generations. Those kids who adapt best to the regimen early, e.g. for hormonal reasons, will be well equipped to freeze brain development at early stages. If we push the maladapted kids to suicide or non-reproduction, we get the exact opposite to the effect intended. In the extreme, we might even start pushing newborns to new heights of learning. Those stressed puppies might never get beyond the level of a well trained dog.
Those who dream of turning brains into computers should be aware that soon the opposite will happen. Computers will mimic brains, and in the end, they will outsmart the smartest of us. Those future computers, as envisaged by Jeff Hawkins and others, will borrow richly from the wisdom of evolution instead of trying to override it.
Eugenics
By definition, eugenics is a good thing. Its a quest to improve the genetic make up of humanity. It may involve eliminating some lethal genetic disorders. Eugenics was given a bad name by Hitler, the Nazis, and others. That Nazi variant could be called a "hate optimization". Instead of improving the gene pool, it was to be made supposedly better but keeping it monoracial. Races are a treasure. They enrich the human gene pool, incl. the pool of genes responsible for multiple intelligences.
We are all guilty of good eugenics. When we choose a mate or spouse we usually go for healthy, nice, and smart. We also go for beautiful, which is an approximate surrogate for measuring good health. In that act of choice, we commit eugenics. The main problem with artificial eugenics is that, in wrong hands, instead of producing future smarter generations we might end up with a tabloid genome whose quality would not differ from the quality of discussions on most Internet fora.
Today, our reproductive choices are subject to the Idiocracy problem. Smart people are less likely to reproduce early. This way they commit dysgenics instead. The problem of late reproduction or non-reproduction is particularly rampant among productivity freaks (like myself). Flynn effect seems to suggest that we are on the right path, however, if we want to prevent dysgenics, we should rather solve the problem of the evolutionary disadvantage of smart brains. Cranking up school pressure might have the opposite effect again.
For the evolution to work, we need to employ the right selection criteria. The pressures of modern life provide wrong criteria. Imagine a Nazi-like scenario in which, to foster smart and precocious brains, we prevent reproduction of kids who speak late. For starters, Einstein would be in front of the queue for the chopping block. If we reward early speech, we promote speedy freeze on brain function and short reproductive cycles. We might end up with fruit fly babies ready to crawl from mama's womb to generate parrot-like speech. It is the exact opposite of what humanity is. We want prolonged and rich brain growth. It takes decades to bring that organ to true heights of genius.
Selecting for early speech would be an example of dysgenics. We might opt for selecting for bigger brains instead. This would not interfere with neural computing and might provide more brain tissue to run the computation. However, size would not necessarily guarantee better brains. Size isn't necessarily the bottleneck of human brain computational power. Availability of time for learning, thinking and creativity seems far more limiting. Instead of smarter generations, we might be like chihuahuas, requiring C-section to guarantee healthy delivery. Instead of smarter humans, we would wave goodbye to natural birth in the lap of nature.
The right approach to brain eugenics might be to select for excellent opus vitae. We might, for example, go for a Genius Sperm Bank, and pay women to conceive and deliver babies using sperm from the bank. Even then, however, we cannot discount the nurture factor. Instead of a genius generation, we might breed more cases of Ted Kaczynski. It seems classical mating and old-fashioned families still come on top in breeding best brains. Instead of "pushing the limits", we should respect the rules of a healthy lifestyle and a healthy brainwork.
Summary: Brain evolution
- learn drive and the natural creativity cycle are marvels of the evolution that are hard to improve upon
- sleepiness and boredom are defense weapons that protect the brain
- evolution of the brain is too slow to benefit mankind much nowadays
- respecting the needs of the brain can bring dramatic returns in intellectual productivity
- early intervention and acceleration in child care may result in stress and worse long-term outcomes
- pushing the brain to the limits does not benefit the evolution of the brain