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The Reason Why It Takes Years - Our Brain Is Too Weak.

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Posted by Alexander on January 10, 2002 22:02:03 UTC

Our brain is quite slow (chem transformations in axons reactions take time, thus propagate along brain very slow: 10-20 m/sec).

To get around that, evolution had to develop parallel processing (in order to react within reasonable few seconds or less) and thus use billions of slow processors instead of one (or few) fast.

Because of specifics of survival (eat or be eaten) evolution did NOT design brain to understand math and physics. Parallel processing works in "associating by matching pattern" way: if the pattern of input signal matches one out of many stored in memory configurations, then that particular configuration is activated from memory and associated with it behavior is triggered. Fast and efficient in a jungle, but not very good in calculating numbers and in deriving logical relationships.

So, brain is simply not suited to study math and physics, but instead is good in searching for associations - sometimes existent, sometimes inexistent (God = human-like creature, or photon = ocean wave, etc).

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