Foreword for the Brain-Body Circuit

Foreword

How can we be the last winner in the evolution? I have none but a very stupid answer which is best unsaid. On the other hand I definitely believe that the humanity can stand above the evolution. The key lies in how we nurture our brain. We are forgetting that our brain is like a seed: if only we nourish it and cherish it properly, we will have an enormous harvest. I say ‘if only’, because we are far too negligent in this matter. Today’s schools let majority of students graduate before they get properly versed in the subjects. It would sound offensive but I have to say this: a factory with such a high rate of deficiency is not allowed to operate. Even the most intelligent people live through their lives without knowing the full extent of their brain’s possibility. In short our brain is malnourished and underdeveloped. I fear that we are in no better place than the dinosaurs were in when they ruled the earth long, long time ago.

The scientists enumerate big crises that can be the cause of their extinction. Do the intelligent people believe that those oversized creatures would have continued ruling the earth but for such dramatic crises? The fact is that they were in the never ending battle called the evolution. The theory stands on the fact that things change: the climate changes so that we have ice ages several times, the earth shifts and the volcanoes erupt so that the face of the earth never stayed the same and the new species are ever ready to spring up to play in the battle for the survival. They sometimes say jokingly that the dinosaurs had the brain the size of a walnut. That is not an accurate description but the point is well taken. Their brain was too small for their huge body to give them enough flexibility in the changing world. If they had to compete with agile mammalian predators like lions or wolves, which know to hunt in a group, how good a chance would they have had? In terms of hunt, to be bigger does not give a definite advantage. Remember the ice age humans; with only stone knives and bearskins, they hunted down the hairy elephant called mammoth into its extinction.

Yes, our ancestors survived the last ice age and did more. They exploited the extremity of the cold climate to spread throughout the surface of the earth. Their success was the reward for their diligence: they utilised their brain power to the full to secure the food supply in scarcity. They also know that they could only survive as a group and not as an individual: a single brain is not enough, only the combined power of the whole brains in the group has a chance. They were the proud people. How about us? What do the modern humans know? To push buttons and to delegate complicated tasks to machines and to smart minority. Can the humanity today laugh at the dinosaurs for their brain?

In 2010 we had the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It began with a terrible explosion. But we have been tapped into the ocean depth for decades; we should have prepared for the deep-water operation that can be extremely difficult due to the enormous pressure. We allowed the great damages done on the environment and on the lives of people before the leak was stopped.

In 2011 we had the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan. We have been made believe that they have completely harnessed the nuclear energy and the humanity has evolved far beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the tragedies at the close of the World War II. The power plant was not designed to withstand the tsunami. Neither nuclear scientists nor engineers had effective contingency plans. I am not aware any scientists present at the scene to end the crisis.

We have countless economists and we still have army of jobless people in the industrialised countries, and the underdeveloped countries have stayed as such for decades.

We have enormous numbers of smart people in the university, in all kinds of institutes and committees, and in every sort of governments. Yet people are dying from hunger, curable diseases and violence. Many people are barely surviving without hope for tomorrow.

A president of a certain powerful nation likes to boast that to give a crash course on high technology promises people new jobs. How many people have the proper academic training to attend such a course? And such jobs get obsolete soon; new machines will replace the humans and the new technology will replace that specific technology.

We need more and more power from whole humanity to solve problems. Can we have enough power?

I have been teaching students and learning from them about our brain. I have been watching them struggling to do better. I have found out why they had to suffer. I have found out the way out from their distress. Then again I had to face the deep-rooted problems they have. They are almost resigned: they cannot believe that they too have as wonderful a brain as smart people do. They believe that nothing short of miraculous formulae can make their performance improved. It takes a long time for each student to have confidence in him- or herself and to take the first firm step toward really improving his or her performance. Where does their defeatist attitude come? How can we give all the children confidence in themselves? How can we make all the parents happy for their confident children? To those questions I am going to answer. And when I have answered, I have also answered how to stand above the evolution. Then we can embark on the new endeavour to ‘ensure a more fruitful life for all mankind’. The quest begins here with the observation of the brain-body circuit.