- Feeling slow?
How about a brain upgrade?
(upbeat electronic music)
Look around at the creatures of Earth.
A lot of them have some amazing abilities,
like the taurus scarab dung beetle.
Sure, it's not very glamorous,
but it can pull 1,140 times its own weight.
That's like a 15 pound French bulldog
pulling a nine ton tyrannosaurus Rex.
So why can't we do that?
Well, when it comes to physical strength,
that just wasn't the main focus of the human genome.
We went all in on our brains.
Take a look back two million years
at our hominid ancestor homo habilis.
Homo habilis had a brain case volume
of about 600 cubic centimeters.
Today the average person has between 1200 and 1300
cubic centimeters, that's more than twice the volume,
and our brains only take up 2% of our body weight
but they require 20% of our body resting energy.
Other creatures look at us like we're this guy.
(spooky music)
Now, it's important to remember, humans are not
necessarily at the end of their evolutionary path.
So is there some way we can boost
our intelligence within our own lifetimes?
Well, lots of studies show that a change
in lifestyle can help boost brain power.
For example, aerobic exercise promotes
stem cell growth in the hippocampus,
which is the part of the brain concerned with,
ah, memory.
Then there could be improvements
in nutrition that help our brain power.
Best evidence for this is when the United States
introduced iodized salt and saw
the average IQ increase by 3.5 points.
Now you may have guessed that these changes
mean modest improvements in our intelligence.
So is there any way we could turn it up to 11?
Well, one way is to look at something
that is pretty counter-intuitive, and that is brain damage.
I'm talking about an extremely rare
and highly controversial condition
called acquired savant syndrome.
Now, this happens as a result to a head injury
or a neurodegenerative disease, and what happens
is the person suddenly discovers an ability
to do something incredible, like sculpture, or play music.
So how did they get that ability?
Some scientists think that we have locked gates
in our brain that hold back our abilities
and that the injury or condition
has unlocked those gates and allowed the people
who have acquired savant syndrome to do these things.
Maybe by using techniques like FMRI
we could learn more about the condition,
and perhaps in the future, even learn ways
to unlock those gates without actually causing brain damage.
Now it's time to talk about brain implants.
You see, computers and brains do similar things,
but they go about it in a very different way.
So if we can get brains and computers to communicate more
easily, we can see a quantum leap in human intelligence.
And we've already made some progress.
Paralysis patients with brain implants have been able
to control robotic prostheses, and get this,
in 2012, researchers with USC and Wake Forest made a brain
implant for the cerebral cortex of rhesus monkeys.
They taught the monkeys how to play
a picture-matching puzzle game, then they gave the monkeys
drugs that diminished their performance.
They then activated the implants.
The implants stimulated the part of the monkey's brain
that was activated whenever it made a correct choice,
and they saw that the lost mental acuity was regained.
Now granted, most of this research
is all about recapturing brain function that's been lost,
it's not about amplifying what we already have.
But in the future we could see this technology
boosting our intelligence and giving us new choices.
Like, you want to be a great scientist?
Well, let's just turn down the part
of the brain that's in charge of confirmation bias.
Or you just want to be a better human being?
Let's boost that altruistic behavior.
So I've got a question for all of you.
If you could boost any part of your mental faculties,
what would it be, and why?
Let me know in the comment below.
Make sure you Like this video and subscribe to our channel,
and then watch these videos.
It's the smart thing to do.
(upbeat music)