I was going to comment upon the comment you made in another post about Gilbert Ling. I'd never heard of them or their ideas and had to go looking the other night. As a result I now know why I never did.
I am extremely tired right now and in the middle of preparing for my thesis committee meeting, so I cannot give this the attention it deserves right now. Come back in a day or three and I will either expand this reply or make another one.
For now:
*From what I've seen, Ling's ideas seem to originally be based upon a few equivocal experiments from the sixties and seventies that have since been contradicted by just about all cellular electrophysiology, enzymology, and membrane biology known.
*All the odd results they point to about ion balance requiring too much energy to be accounted for via active-transport ion pumps in the membrane have been solved to my satisfaction by more recent work, especially in neurons, and all their talk about cells with compromised membranes maintaining ion balance seem like they can be explained by work on calcium-triggered membrane vesicle fusion from the nineties.
*This proposed role for ATP in unwinding proteins is experimentally unsupported by an...
I think this post illustrates the kind of thinking that made me hate molecular biology. I started studying bioinformatics with the plan of afterwards making a master in neuroinformatics and do congitive enhancement. I used to believe.
You basically think that there something called intelligence with has a clear definition which you don't have to establish. Then you say that evolution tried to maximize that intelligence and think that the thing that contrains intelligence obviously falls in your domain of molecular biology and has to be ATP.
A while ago I tried to get a performance metric for my brain functioning and did it through a bunch of reaction tests. At the beginning I called it intelligence. I talk with a psychology phd and he told me if I wanted to speak to an academic audience I shouldn't use the word intelligence but rather speak about cognitive performance.
Ten million years ago our ancestors made decisions very differently than todays humans do. Today's humans use very different heustrics to make decisions and there no good reason to assume that we spent a lot of time from an evolutionary perspective to optimize our brains to make decisions based on those heuristics.
Thos...
The massive variation in human intelligence and the positive correlation between IQ and pretty much everything good implies that "Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage" isn't true
Also, it's possible that humans were quickly evolving towards being more intelligent when they got interrupted by the invention of civilization and there's still more low-hanging fruit to be picked.
Not in this case. This is a good example of how you can go wrong by overcontrolling (or maybe we should chalk this up as an example of how correlations!=causations?)
Suppose the causal model of Genes->Intelligence->Education->Less-Reproduction is true (and there are no other relationships). Then if we regress on Less-Reproduction and include Intelligence & Education as predictors, we discover that after controlling for Education, Intelligence adds no predictive value & explains no variance & is uncorrelated with Less-Reproduction. Sure, of course: all Intelligence is good for is predicting Education, but we already know each individual's Education. This is an interesting and valid result worth further research in our hypothetical world.
Does this mean dysgenics will be false, since the coefficient of Intelligence is estimated at ~0 by our little regression formula? Nope! We can get dysgenics easily: people with high levels of Genes will cause high levels of Intelligence, which will cause high levels of Education, which will cause high levels of Less-Reproduction, which means that their genes will be be selected against and the next generation start with lower Ge...
Birds (especially corvids and parrots) seem to pack surprising amounts of intelligence into small brains. Could there be some efficiencies worth studying there?
My understanding was that when humans learned to cook, this essentially allowed us to outsource our digestion to fire, use fewer calories digesting, and thus dramatically increase the net number of calories we got from eating (or something like that), and that this energy jackpot played a big role in our evolution of larger brains.
Anyway, interesting post. RomeoStevens suggested consuming foods high in glucose the other day when I was complaining about being tired, and that actually seemed to work pretty well. So I'm eager to hear about research along th...
To Casiothesane and others, or anyone reading in the future, it’s probably bad form to comment on a 6 year-old post and also, probably not fair to the opinions of those who have had six years to emend them, even if they still have the same views they may express them more persuasively, now, or in ways I could not anticipate. That qualification given, I suggest people interested in this topic look into the work of Thoke, Olsen, Bagatolli and colleagues, who have made progress on Ling’s AI theory in the last three years (like Google those names and “water” “
...Brain energy is often confused with motivation, but these are two distinct phenomena. Brain energy is the actual metabolic energy available to the neurons, in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules. ATP is the "energy currency" of the cell, and is produced primarily by oxidative metabolism of energy from food.
I think you are right but it isn't as obvious as that. See Roy Baumeister and the thesis that will power is due to blood glucose levels.
Brains use less energy when they're doing familiar skills than when they're learning. Perhaps there's some energy to be freed up if learning can be made more efficient.
I don't see how
maintaining the low entropy living state in a non-firing neuron requires little energy. This implies that the brain may already be very efficient, where nearly all energy is used to function, grow, and adapt.
leads to the assertion that intelligence is cell-energy limited and that increasing brain metabolism (on timescales shorter than evolutionary) will lead to increased IQ. In particular, I don't know of evidence that starving people become stupid.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/10/24/one-way-to-be-less-wrong-is-to-avoid-faulty-premises/
Introduction
Brain energy is often confused with motivation, but these are two distinct phenomena. Brain energy is the actual metabolic energy available to the neurons, in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules. ATP is the "energy currency" of the cell, and is produced primarily by oxidative metabolism of energy from food. High motivation increases the use of this energy, but in the absence of sufficient metabolic capacity it eventually results in stress, depression, and burnout as seen in manic depression. Most attempts at cognitive enhancement only address the motivation side of the equation.
-Ray Peat, PhD
Cellular Thermodynamics
-Eliezer Yudkowsky (Algernon’s Law)
I propose that this constrain is imposed by the energy cost of intelligence. The conventional textbook view of neurology suggests that much of the brain's energy is "wasted" in overcoming the constant diffusion of ions across the membranes of neurons that aren't actively in use. This is necessary to keep the neurons in a 'ready state' to fire when called upon.
Why haven't we evolved some mechanism to control this massive waste of energy?
The Association-Induction hypothesis formulated by Gilbert Ling is an alternate view of cell function, which suggests a distinct functional role of energy within the cell. I won't review it in detail here, but you can find an easy to understand and comprehensive introduction to this hypothesis in the book "Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life" by Gerald H. Pollack (amazon link). This idea has a long history with considerable experimental evidence, which is too extensive to review in this article.
The Association-Induction hypothesis states that ion exclusion in the cell is maintained by the structural ordering of water within the cytoplasm, by an interaction between the cytoskeletal proteins, water molecules, and ATP. Energy (in the form of ATP) is used to unfold proteins, presenting a regular pattern of surface charges to cell water. This orders the cell water into a 'gel like' phase which excludes specific ions, because their presence within the structure is energetically unfavorable. Other ions are selectively retained, because they are adsorbed to charged sites on protein surfaces. This structured state can be maintained with no additional energy. When a neuron fires, this organization collapses, which releases energy and performs work. The neuron uses significant energy only to restore this structured low entropy state, after the neuron fires.
This figure (borrowed from Gilbert Ling) summarizes this phenomena, showing a folded protein (on the left) and an unfolded protein creating a low entropy gel (on the right).
To summarize, maintaining the low entropy living state in a non-firing neuron requires little energy. This implies that the brain may already be very efficient, where nearly all energy is used to function, grow, and adapt rather than pump the same ions 'uphill' over and over.
Cost of Intelligence
To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky again, "the evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring." Mammalian brains may already be nearly as efficient as their physics and structure allows, and any increase in intelligence comes with a corresponding increase in energy demand. Brain energy consumption appears correlated with intelligence across different mammals, and humans have unusually high energy requirements due to our intelligence and brain size.
Therefore if an organism is going to compete while having a greater intelligence, it must be in a situation where this extra intelligence offers a competitive advantage. Once intelligence is adequate to meet the demands of survival in a given environment, extra intelligence merely imposes unnecessary nutritional requirements.
These thermodynamic realities of intelligence lead to the following corollary to Algernon’s Law:
Any increase in intelligence implies a corresponding increase in brain energy consumption.
Potential Implications
-Henry David Thoreau
This idea can be applied to both evaluate nootropics, and to understand and treat cognitive problems. It's unlikely that any drug will increase intelligence without adverse effects, unless it also acts to increase energy availability in the brain. From this perspective, we can categorically exclude any nootropic approaches which fail to increase oxidative metabolism in the brain.
This idea shifts the search for nootropics from neurotransmitter like drugs that improve focus and motivation, to those compounds which regulate and support oxidative metabolism such as glucose, thyroid hormones, some steroid hormones, cholesterol, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and enzyme cofactors.
Why haven't we already found that these substances increase intelligence?
Deficiencies in all of these substances do reduce intelligence. Further raising brain metabolism above normal healthy levels should be expected to be a complex problem because of the interrelation between the molecules required to support metabolism:
If you increase oxidative metabolism, the demand for all raw materials of metabolism is correspondingly increased. Any single deficiency poses a bottleneck, and may result in the opposite of the intended result.
So this suggests a 'systems biology' approach to cognitive enhancement. It's necessary to consider how metabolism is regulated, and what substrates it requires. To raise intelligence in a safe and effective way, all of these substrates must have increased availability to the neuron, in appropriate ratios.
I am always leery of drawing analogies between brains and computers but this approach to cognitive enhancement is very loosely analogous to over-clocking a CPU. Over-clocking requires raising both the clock rate, and the energy availability (voltage). In the case of the brain, the effective 'clock rate' is controlled by hormones (primarily triiodothyronine aka T3), and energy availability is provided by glucose and other nutrients.
It's not clear if merely raising brain metabolism in this way will actually result in a corresponding increase in intelligence, however I think it's unlikely that the opposite is possible (increasing intelligence without raising brain metabolism).