A newborn's brain is adding up to 700 new neural connections per second. This continues with little pruning through age 2. Then massive pruning for the next 4 years, Stabilizes for a while, and then focuses primarily on mild building and pruning through adulthood. This is most likely still going on in old people too. OK So. who knows what capabilities were inherent in those mega connections before pruning? How would we even find out?
I'm just guessing, but it may or may not be associated with all the learning that very small children have to do. The biggest and most obvious is learning natural language. There's learning to walk and the whole matter of learning to live with others and operate in social groups. I'll also speculate that having too many connections in a neural network might be just as bad as having too few. Trimming them might be just as important in increasing intellectual powers as is multiplying them.
As the growing and pruning process progresses, the remaining axions get a coating of insulating myelin. Streamlining and increasing efficiency...........? One still wonders about the millions of connections formed and then abandoned. Seems a curious thing.
I wonder what those millions of connections would be when regarded as a percentage of overall neural-ness, instead of as "just a number"? When you consider small children essentially doubling their bodyweight, regarding the amount of extra mass as "just a number" seems to be lacking appropriate context. I wonder if the brain could be regarded in much the same manner?
If connections were not pruned away, then everything would be associated with everything, and the results would be chaos rather than understanding. If taking a gulp of milk were tied with every other stimulus - a sniffle from mom, the colour blue, a bird chirping, then the child would never be able to connect milk with sating its hunger. etc. etc. What is not connected is as important as what is connected.
The human brain has two centers of consciousness. One center is connected to the conscious; ego and other to the unconscious mind; inner self. Humans differ from animals in that animals only have one center, analogous to the inner self of humans. The extra vitality and the enhanced sensory ability of animals is connected to animals being centered via the inner self. This center has much more access to the brain's capacities. The conscious center; ego, found in humans, is relatively new in term of evolution. Based on civilization, this center appears to be less than 10,000 years old. The conscious center gives us choice and free will apart from the instincts within unconscious mind. The result is we, as humans, have lost our natural capabilities and access to natural human instincts, in exchange for cultural conditioned analogies. Instead of being able to track food, we learn how to go to the store. This takes much less brain power than tracking and hunting, but it nevertheless leads to the same results and better, allowing any human to participate. The prosthetic affect makes things better for more people, by requiring less brain power. This can be regressive in terms of natural selection since everyone gets selected and weakness is perpetuated. The previous stage of evolution, over the past 10,000 years, was developing the ego center. The next stage of human evolution is learning to return to the unconscious center, so one can increase the access to the brain. Often in religions, paradise is a return to outer simplicity; nature, along with enhanced inner complexity; able to integrate. Once that stage is reached, the next step would be to use both centers to help raise the set point. of the brain.The future may be natural humans who can survive in or out of culture; fluid adaption.
No, you're just using an antiquated definition of 'weakness'. Strength in evolutionary terms means propagating one's genes. If going to the store is an advantage over skinning bison in our modern world, then everyone who can do it has an advantage.
