Exploring Interesting Questions About the Human Brain

The human brain is a fascinating organ, and it accounts for much of the distinction between human beings and other life forms. Interesting questions regarding the brain arise. For example, why is it that, in early stages of human evolution, having increasing intelligence and brain power was an asset that was promoted by natural selection? Why can people not remember their earliest months of life? Why is the human brain so heavily oriented toward the visual sense? This paper provides an explanation for such phenomena.

Why Higher Brain Power and Intelligence Evolved in Humans

Other individuals, being creatures of volitional consciousness, can perform a far greater variety of activities than inanimate objects or lower life forms. Interacting with them, which can be of great benefit to survival, requires understanding their motives and attributes, which demands of the brain at least the same level of intricacy as displayed by others; the men who historically had such brains possessed survival advantages and were more likely to produce viable offspring, thus resulting in an evolutionary increase in brain power, with social interaction as a possible strong basis for natural selection of more advanced minds.

Why People Cannot Remember their Earliest Months

During the first months of one's life, though one is conscious of existence, one does not yet possess the ability to conceptualize with respect to that awareness. Without at least implicit conceptualization, which happens as children begin to learn to speak and analyze cause and effect, one's external perceptions are but disjoint, unrelated sequences of images, with no particular characteristics about them to render them memorable or even open to systematization of any sort. Without a systematic approach, the brain cannot retain items in memory, because long-term memory stores those images and facts that are recollected multiple times (and usually deliberately so) on the basis of a conceptual awareness that the fact or image is of some significance to the individual.

Why a Large Portion of the Brain is Devoted to Vision