What powers intelligence?

I have been thinking lately. “Yes, I know some of you have warned me about doing that”. Anyway there I was thinking about “thinking”. Water, air and the sun powers life, but what really powers intelligence?

I guess to start with, it would have to be with the brain. The human brain is extremely unique (or at least we humans would like to think so). It performs an incredible amount of complex tasks such as:

• Controlling your heart rate and breathing
• Accepting a flood of information about the world around us through various senses
• It controls our physical motion, and helping me type this out this very moment in time
• It allows us to experience our happiest moments to our saddest emotions

But having a brain doesn’t automatically provide intelligence. Just ask Paris (and I don’t mean the city).

So what really powers the intelligence of the people in the 21st century? In my humble opinion, that would be electricity. Though fire may have helped humans cooked food all the way back 1.9 million years ago, I think electricity has to be one of the (if not the most important discovery in human history).

I’m not even talking about the 100 billion nerve cells in our brains (called neurons) that gathers and transmit electrochemical signals. If you want to learn more about that search for “neuroscience” or “neurobiology” on the internet, because I’m not talking about those. No, I’m talking about the electricity that I use to power the computer that I’m using right now, and my mobile phone, and my GPS and my air conditioner (which has to be the second most important discovery in human history).

We have come to a point where we can’t sustain intelligence without the assistance of an electronic device that is powered by electricity. Do you remember when you were younger, you tend to be able to remember that hundreds if not thousands of phone number at the top of your head? The directions to your local supermarket? The birthdays and anniversaries. Unless of course; you’re a guy, but you’d probably still remember your own birthday.

Now we depend on our mobile phones, GPS and computers. It was to allow us to free our mind to think about something more valuable. But what exactly are these more valuable thoughts we are suppose to be thinking about?

I once misplaced my mobile phone, and the first thing that pop onto my mind was to make a call to it and hope that it’s ringing would guide me towards it. Shortly after; I realised, unlike some of my friends in the sales line, I didn’t have like 300 other phones. So the second thing that came to my mind, was in fact to run a search on “Google”. GOOGLE?!? That wouldn’t have worked very well. Because Google’s pigeon technology wouldn’t have indexed my phone as well. (At this point I was laughing very hard at myself to have thought about it).

But you get the point. Some of us have become so dependant on technology and electronics, that when the battery runs out, we’d have the same intelligence level of a single-celled microorganism (which is more that what I can say for some of our government officials).

When would the dumbest person the sharpest tool in the shed? The answer, when the smartest person runs out of juice.

 

So the question really comes back to, is the availability of technology (powered by electricity) really making us more intelligent or less? I think we can all benefit from some additional time spent on thinking. “Think Time” is something I will be writing in the near future. Now that’s something for you to think about.

Update: I did eventually find my mobile phone, in my library (the loo). Here are some things to make you appear more intelligent. Do note one of them doesn’t belong *evil grin*