The energy consumption of the human brain does not leave much to the imagination. If 95% of the glucose burned daily is used to maintain the networks that make up the "I", the "who I am", or the "where I am" or "this is what I know", it leaves only 5% to everything else, and that other is the one that is responsible for processing the senses connecting with the outside world and the rest for the higher intellectual faculties, if there is anything left for it.
One of the most significant of these faculties is the ability to solve problems.
This capacity is agonized by the lack of resources in the brains of modern hominids. The culture has encouraged its replacement by models to copy that only require the effort of imitation and has done so using the language fundamentally to transmit those recipes. And the training process consists mainly of routines of training and conditioning to give standard answers to the series of situations that the individual usually faces in his life. The only "superior" reasoning capacity would be to be able to recognize the pattern and associate it with the tested response.
Here we can not help but remember Ivan Petróvich Pávlov and his study of the conditional reflex. Pavlov observed that the salivation of the dogs they used in their experiments was produced by the presence of food or by the experimenters themselves, and then determined that it could be the result of a psychological activity, which he called "conditional reflex". This difference between "conditioned" and "conditional" is important, since the term "conditioned" refers to a state, while the term "conditional" refers to a relation, which is precisely the object of its investigation.
He made the well-known experiment consisting in sounding a metronome (at 100 beats per minute, although it is popularly believed that he used a bell) just before feeding a dog powder, arriving at the conclusion that, when the dog was hungry, I began to salivate nothing else when I heard the sound of the metronome.
That is, I can induce a real physiological response just by showing a predefined random pattern. In other words, if I want the animal to perform a certain complex action, I can condition it on simple triggers that are easy to assimilate.
For example, in the instruction in the army at any time to the sergeant's shout "To land!", Instinctively abandon everything that is being done and even what is held between the hands and the individual, without having to think , it is thrown to the ground as it falls.
More complex examples, we are constantly given traditional education. We trigger an answer immediately as soon as the teacher gives us a recognizable approach. When he hears "five by eight", the word "forty" instantly appears in his mind.
For this it is not necessary to develop superior intellectual abilities, nor is it necessary to imitate or recognize memes.
This enormous facility that the animal brain has to assimilate patterns, recognize them and give an answer, is what has led from the beginning of civilization to educate individuals to execute satisfactorily pre-established functions with minimal effort on the part of the society and the individual.
In addition, society finds it very convenient that the individual responds similarly to the same stimuli, and if he does not do so, there are always ways of punishment and repression of undesirable behaviors.
In this way, an individual can spend his whole life without thinking. Just imitate, remember, perceive, marry the boss and respond.
These tasks can be performed by any robot without any problem, rather than the amount of data to be recognized, which is just a matter of memory and fast matching capacity, for which the brain of the current human is very competent.
It is increasingly similar to that of a dog, because functionally society needs more dogs than humans.
Where was the problem-solving ability?
Solve problems that arose at every moment was what led to the encephalization of hominids who should be able to solve new situations, often vital, without having the crutches of culture, without being trained is to give simple solutions. The Neanderthals and the first Cromagnons were specialists in this. With a brain endowed with more neurons than modern and free of conceptual garbage, they were in a position to give real answers to real problems.
Real means that it was taken from perception, from the senses. These humans heard, smelled, saw, touched ... perceived with all their senses and used perception to elaborate responses that were effective as they were replicated with great success.
In their brains the capacity for high level reasoning and the development of the senses prevailed over conceptualization. That meant that they lived in reality, stuck to it.
Their descendants, victims of their own success, flooded with concepts, live immersed in the reverie of them. They do not smell, they do not see, they do not hear more than just enough to identify the external stimulus with a label that marries and assesses the situation on the properties of the concept, not on the sensory stimuli that come to it and that it does not attend. The modern human is the conceptual being, alienated in his own recreations, blind and deaf that only attends to what his own mind provides him.
Thinking has been left for the most advanced mathematicians. Intuition seems like magic. Unable to solve new situations, it does not identify them and is blocked.
Living with your head stuck in a hole alone is feasible in an environment of individuals that have made it possible. And it does not matter if they are in one continent or another, they are unable to leave their nomenclature, their namā.
These asleep, are very sleepy, so much that it is impossible to wake them up. They are beings connected to themselves and to others in their language bubble. In their absolute blindness they affirm without a doubt that they leave the dream reading, that is, with more concepts, that is, going deeper into the nightmare.
Nobody has awakened sinking into sleep. That does not matter to them. They can not understand, because they can not. For them, all reality is what appears in their dreams.
The diagnosis of this immense infirmary of sleeping humanoids that are agitated tormented, and happy at times, is depressing. You can not wake up. No longer. Many centuries ago hope was lost.
How does the brain recover?
How is rubbish erased?
And, the most immediate: How to make those who still could do so wake up minimally?
I can say that lullaby and caressing only get them to turn around.