There’s a lot of complexity around intelligence and how intelligence is formed and what exactly goes on in your head. And we keep trying to duplicate the way the brain works on a micro scale of neurons and synapses and memory engrams which I am aware is a thing from Star Trek but it definitely has some sort of analogy in real brain chemistry.
Your memory has a physical form; there’s a chemical structure that represents this memory; there’s a way to apply electricity to this chemical structure that makes the memory resurface. The alternative is supernatural, and I think that’s probably more of what is going on, but perhaps a better word than “supernatural” is “misunderstood.”
There’s going to be a little woo here, so bear with me on it. You don’t have to believe any of the woo for the rest of this to make sense.
We’ve been looking at the structure of the human brain for decades and there’s one really clear message: there doesn’t seem to be enough going on in there. The brain is doing so much so fast and so well that surely there ought to be something happening but it just doesn’t happen and then weird shit happens like the body does a thing and then the brain says to do the thing and this doesn’t make any sense unless time is going backward in your brain and that’s just a violation of the laws of causality. Like how even would that work.
But I am from a different world, my degree is in occult science, which mean I am accustomed to thinking about the world in dimensions and cross-sections and Things Unseen. The eighties were wild, you could actually get a degree in this shit. And while Rudolf Steiner was a visionary and revolutionary thinker for the nineteenth century, he is hopelessly backwards and ignorant for the twenty-first, so this degree is absolutely worthless. I was a Republican back then. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t make good decisions. I voted for Bush.
Being from this other side of the discussion, my immediate reaction is that human memory and cognition do not necessarily take place in the four corporeal dimensions. They can take place in secret fifth-and-further dimensions that we don’t perceive or understand.
So what we see happening in the brain is not your body doing the thing and the brain thinking it later, but something akin to a wireless remote: a signal comes from Elsewhere, it is received in the brain, the body does what the signal commands, and the component that received the signal has some electrochemical response as a result of receiving and transmitting the signal.
Right now, this is “supernatural,” because we don’t understand what the signal is or how it is sent and received or what is doing the sending. But I have absolute faith that if this is in fact what is going on, someone will figure it out, and they will point and say “look, there is the thing sending the signal, and here on this device we can see the signal being sent and received.”
In other words, it is not really supernatural at all, we simply do not have a clear picture of the process. This is how scientific inquiry has unfolded since the beginning of time.
And that’s the end of the woo, so you can go back to paying attention now.
The way I think of intelligence working is kind of like a library. Whenever a thing happens to you, whether you see a thing or do a thing or just think a thing, your brain makes a little note and sticks it in a folder. And this folder has a label on it, which more or less identifies what is in it.
That folder goes on a desk, which is your active fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the intelligence you are still shuffling around in your head. It is distinct from what we call crystallised intelligence which is mostly static - things you know very well and don’t tend to forget. We’ll get to the crystallised intelligence in a bit.
Anyway, you can only have so much stuff on your desk. You have a quantity of cognitive capacity that you can use to think about things. And on the fluid side, that is your desk. When your desk gets full, your brain needs to make room, so it takes the oldest and least-used folders on the desk and it throws them on the floor.
When they hit the floor, of course, they are just folders. The stuff in them scatters everywhere, and can end up mixed into other folders. This is one of the ways you forget things, or find them in weird places, like you’ll be thinking about some old class you took in middle school and then suddenly remember that book you read about the neglected kid putting graffiti everywhere in their school to try and get attention from her parents.
What was the name of it again? You can’t remember. And the reason you can’t remember is that this memory is in the wrong folder. You have a folder for that book, which includes the title and the author and all the details, but you didn’t think about it much. So when you needed space on your desk, you threw it on the floor, and the plot synopsis slid out of the folder and into the “middle school classes” folder which you also didn’t think about very much.
Meanwhile, if you happened to think about that book, you wouldn’t remember what it was about, but you would vividly remember some of the scenes in it. It would be odd and disconnected and mildly surreal, to remember so clearly what happened in the book but not what it was about.
These are common experiences. You’ve undoubtedly had them; we’ve all had them. It’s a natural feature of human memory. And there’s no physical equivalence here, it’s just an idea. A way to think about it. There is no physical chemical “folder” structure in your head, I don’t think, any more than it contains physical chemical “note” structures.
None of this stuff is lost. Just like if you throw the folder on the floor in your actual office, if you need that folder, you can pick it back up; it’s just a little muddled, maybe. You’ll toss something else on the floor to make room for it.
But every six to seven years, your brain goes through a process called neural pruning. And neural pruning is when your brain takes all the folders, and binds them into little books. These books go on a shelf, mostly; you have a sort of metaphorical shelf in your head where all your crystallised intelligence goes. Once all the folders on your desk are bound into books, they get sorted and placed carefully on the shelf, so you can find them.
If there is no room on your shelf, the oldest and least-used books get tossed off the shelf onto the floor. And once you’ve finished putting books on the shelf, all the books on the floor get tossed in a big sort of bin, off to the side. It’s still there! You can still get to it; it’s crystallised intelligence, after all, and it’s not going anywhere. But that bin is hard to sort through — nothing is in order, it’s all just crammed into the bin haphazardly. All the stuff you know but never really think about.
Then your brain dutifully tidies up the floor by binding all the folders on the floor into books, too. These books get left on the floor. So every six to seven years, your desk gets cleared and the mess of folders on the floor cleaned up, and you have a period of relative clarity.
Any of the books — whether on the shelf, or on the floor, or even in the bin — can still be pulled out and put on the desk if you need them. They’re just harder to find on the floor than on the shelf, and much harder to find if they’re in the bin. Again, if there’s no room on your desk, you’ll throw something on the floor to make room.
Physically, what’s going on is your brain is shuffling connections around and running synaptic wiring. As far as we can tell, anyway. Everything physically stays where it is, only the connections change. We call it “pruning” because in the early days, what we mostly saw was the part where things go into the bin… the most evident change was things we don’t use being dropped from the main network.
Today, of course, we see more than that. Connections are strengthened, weakened, optimised, organised. A lot is going on in there. But this is nothing compared to the alternating rounds of axon-terminal neural pruning.
In axon-terminal neural pruning, a lot more of that goes on. It’s far more extensive, and tends to be accompanied by an explosion of grey and white matter growth in the brain. These happen every other round of pruning, so every twelve to fourteen years.
If you just thought to yourself “why, that’s puberty” you are absolutely correct. And while there aren’t a bunch of physical changes to go with it, there’s another brain rewiring just like it twelve to fourteen years later. So if you just thought “that’s when we regard a brain as fully formed and adult” you can score yourself another spot on the bingo card, with another one if you carry that twelve to fourteen years further and see the typical age of a midlife crisis.
Now if you connect the dots to the ages of 52 and 65, and the idea that we understood these boundaries in human development existed long before we knew why, or what was causing them? That they’re reflected in human society all the way back to prehistory, even to the bar mitzvah and announcing “today I am a man” to the community?
Well, that’s bingo, right there. You’re starting to clue into something important. But let’s talk a little more about axon-terminal neural pruning.
First, the brain is keeping track of what it binds into a book, as a sort of imperfect inventory mechanism. If it’s been bound into a book, it had to be a folder that went on your desk, after all; and once it’s bound into a book, it ought to go on your shelf.
Your brain looks at this tally — over the last twelve to fourteen years — and reasons that your desk should be big enough for all those folders, and your shelf should be big enough for all those books. So if necessary, it orders a new, bigger desk and more shelves to go with it.
And your brain likes certain things. It likes to have the desk and shelves full of stuff, nature does abhor a vacuum after all, so when there is a lot of empty space on them it will push you to fill the space. But it also hates to throw folders and books on the floor, let alone in the bin, so when the space starts to get filled up it starts encouraging you to stop thinking about new things.
Different people have different thresholds. Ideally, in a perfect world, you would fill your desk precisely in six or seven years — and doing this twice would fill your shelves precisely, leading your brain to dust off its hands and say “well, good job me!” as it repeated the same shelf order without needing to order a new desk at all.
But the world is neither ideal nor perfect, and your brain dislikes different amounts of “empty” and “full” compared to others. You might have a brain that wants your desk 30% full, and is then content so long as you get it to 60% full by the neural pruning round.
You might have one that wants it at least 50% full but also no more than 50% full, so you go through this flurry of learning and discovery followed by a long period of intellectual paralysis and disinterest.
If you’re very unlucky, you might have a brain that is unhappy with a desk that is less than 60% full, but also unhappy with one that is more than 40% full, so you go through a flurry of learning followed by a long period of anxiety and compulsion with probably a bout of depression toward the end. Your brain never gets to be content; it’s simply not in you. You are always intellectually unhappy.
These preferences dictate what sort of intellectual life you’ll lead, in terms of doing and learning new things. Shortly after a period of neural pruning, you’ll be driven to do and learn some new things until your desk is full enough, and then that drive will go away until your desk is too full… when you’ll start wanting to just hunker down and stop doing or learning anything.
Chances are very good that the space between those two thresholds is what you will learn in each six to seven year period. This is complicated, of course, by the size of your desk; your 20% may be someone else’s 40%, or vice-versa.
And to complicate it further, you can train your brain to like and want different thresholds by pushing it into uncomfortable territory and then rewarding it for being there.
The most effective thing, and the thing your brain loves the most, is to accurately predict the future. There’s literally nothing it loves more. If you think to yourself that something will happen, and then you’re right, that makes your brain happier than anything.
If that’s a little too difficult, it likes sugar, salt, and fat. Candied nuts are good. Generally easier than predicting the future, but if you just try to predict things more frequently, you’ll be right more frequently, and that helps.
It’s like ten thirty at night now, and I want to get this out while it’s still technically Monday, so I’ll probably revisit this in the future. I typically do, it’s a theory I’ve been working with for a couple decades now.