Ideology and the Human Brain

Upon reading this BBC report...

US researchers found they could predict how well an amateur player might perform on a game by measuring the volume of key sections of the brain.

Writing in the journal Cerebral Cortex, they suggest their findings could have wider implications for understanding the differences in learning rates.

There is broad acceptance of a link between brain size and intelligence.

...Upon reading this report, I thought of Boskop Man. Who can such a person be? To begin with, he is extinct—he no longer walks the earth. But he once did, and today his remains are either controversial or obscure. Everyone knows about Mr. Neanderthal; few know of this Mr. Boskop. Why? One, Boskop came from black Africa; two, he had an unusually huge brain; and three, the first two (black Africa/big brain) are not supposed to go together.

It's easy for humans to deal with hominids (Neanderthals and others along those lines) that had smaller brains than us, but it is difficult to accept the fact that the world has seen hominids—particular African hominids—who had more brains than we do. From Big Brain, a book by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger:

In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.

These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England.

Later in the book:

[P]eople do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life.

Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

Lynch and Granger speculate that the enormous Boskop brain ("[Their] brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own—that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc... that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent") gave them a deeper, dreamier, and wider experience of the world.

While your own prefrontal area might link a sequence of visual material to form an episodic memory, the Boskop may have added additional material from sounds, smells, and so on. Where your memory of a walk down a Parisian street may include the mental visual image of the street vendor, the bistro, and the charming little church, the Boskop may also have had the music coming from the bistro, the conversations from other strollers, and the peculiar window over the door of the church. Alas, if only the Boskop had had the chance to stroll a Parisian boulevard!

And that is the problem. They had no civilization to express/exploit their dreams and imaginings. They lived around 10,000 years ago, but the only civilization suitable for their gifts of memory and processing (Greece) did not appear until 2000 years ago. But imagine if in our world (our information age) there was race of people who could do this with their minds:

We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention?

A brain with a split-screen affect!

Boskop’s greater brains and extended internal representations may have made it easier for them to accurately predict and interpret the world, to match their internal representations with real external events.

Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.

The beautiful ones have already been born.