Evolution of human brain

An interesting article, yaracuy.

The following paragraph caught my attention.

In the paper, the team points out that the larger human brain, which is more than three times as big as that of a chimp, also has much higher energy demands. Thus, the human brain uses up to 25% of the body's total available energy when we're at rest, compared with no more than about 10% for other primates.
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As we age, our digestive system begins to fail and energy is less available to the body and brain. There may be a simple correlation right there, as our brains require a lot of energy according to the information given.

I had never actually contemplated a number as high as 25% even when we are at rest.

In horses, the teeth wear out as the horse becomes aged, and the horse finds it difficult to ingest enough energy to maintain body weight. As more horses are being kept as companion animals, we have opportunity to observe them in the latter stages of life and I observe that they seem to exhibit symptoms of cognitive failure when compared to their earlier conditioned responses when younger. :bugeye:
 
I think the articles lacks common sense. Say you you compare a body builder to a sedate person with little muscle mass. As they age, which will lose more muscle? The one who used their muscle the most; gained the most muscle mass.

Apes don't use much brain power to begin with, and therefore never develop the brain as much as humans. Less develop means less to shrink when they age. If you begin stupid, one may not notice significant deteriation of mental skills as they age. But if work the brain and become an Albert Einstein, aging to even normal, will look like dementia due to the contrast.
 
scheherazade said:
In horses, the teeth wear out as the horse becomes aged, and the horse finds it difficult to ingest enough energy to maintain body weight. As more horses are being kept as companion animals, we have opportunity to observe them in the latter stages of life and I observe that they seem to exhibit symptoms of cognitive failure when compared to their earlier conditioned responses when younger. :bugeye:
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I've wondered where do you either bury or take your horses once they die? Is there a horse mausoleum or cemetery?
 
If you look at neurons, these cells stop dividing early in our life. Subsequent growth is via dendrite and axon branching processess. These combined to make synapses.

One theory for aging is connected to cell division and the shrinking of the tail ends of the DNA during each cell cycle. Once the tail end get too short, the cell can no longer replicate, successfully, causing death. If this is true, the neurons are like eternal cells, since they have learned to stop replicating, preserving their DNA tails. Neurons can live for decades on atomic recycle. Logically, it is all the other cell types, which will periodically divide. These will break down first (lose tails), with the brain sort of a victim of the local and global attrition. The brain uses a lot of energy and needs substantial support. As the global processing plant, composed of temporal cells ages, this support suffers.

If you look at the brain and nervous system, nerve endings appear near most cells. Since nervous tissue is smart tissue, what we have in our body is smart tissue near nearly all the cells. The question becomes, why put smart tissue near most of the cells? Is it there for decoration? The answer is to do something smart, such as to be part of a control systen for temporary cell expression, via feedback control to the brain. This way you have your eternal cells in charge of the temporary cells setting the potential to make them last longer; approach eternal. By controlling cell cycles and by helping cells get more life from each cycle, life is extended. But there are many external factors which impact this ideal situation, many of which will cause the global processing plant to atrophy.

Since the nervous control system is everywhere in the body and can send feedback to the brain, a smart control design would compare the real time image of the current state to an ideal image of what it should ideally be. The potential between the ideal set point and the real time control, sets potential for feedback.

Say you used a youthful neural control image as the set point for real time differentiation control, but with the body being much older. There will be a huge difference between the ideal and the real (teen age set point image in someone 75). The elderly return to a second childhood because the brain set point image needs to regress to childood to help set a maximum control potential with the aged power plant. The trade-off is an extension of the power plant life, but at cost will be the neurons regressing to the control image; one will lose that mature edge.
 
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