If homo sapiens has scaled up to the top of the ecosystem pyramid, it is thanks to our intellect – sapiens literally means knowledgeable or wise, being the origin of savant, or sapient, one who knows.
So if you know, you rule. How do you know? You learn and assimilate. How do you learn and assimilate? You either repeat something again and again and again, until it becomes part of your cognitive memory (like arithmetic tables, songs or poems, history dates or events), or you do something again and again and again until it becomes part of your muscle memory (like dance routines, navigation, cooking, etc).
In effect, when someone says they know something, it is almost certainly a product of practice. Nobody is born knowing the list of Mughal emperors or the chemical properties of all elements or all capitals of all countries.
Do I hear you say, “What’s the point of knowing these things?”
Glad you asked. There is. One of the reasons our brains have been ticking away is how much work we’ve made them do.
Before smartphones got fitted with nearly infinite memories, we learnt up scores of phone numbers. Before calculators became cheap and ubiquitous, we worked out sums and fractions and percentages in our heads. And before Google, Wikipedia and AI turned everything on its head, we spent hours searching inside our minds for the southernmost city in Argentina, the connections between things, and the second line of the refrain of Closer by … oh no, who was it?
Physical labour was conquered by when the Industrial Revolution spawned machines to alleviate the burden on us. Then we found, to our dismay, that the back-breaking work also kept us supple, flexible and fit. So, we invented gyms. Instead of picking up bricks, firewood and suchlike, we now lift dumbbells and kettle bells.
First, we hunted, and we gathered, and we ate. Depending on when Prometheus stole fire from the gods or when we discovered rubbing two flintstones, we began to cook. Cut to the last century. We learned to process food. It made us obese, and our teeth began to weaken and got impacted from lack of use. So, we invented Diets. Keto and Paleo and Organic. We now choose to eat healthy.
Now, how do you keep your brain from freezing, wasting away, or turning into mush? You do things to improve, expand and enhance your brain capacity. With every bit of information accessible at the merest tap, how do we keep our own synapses from going dull?
Welcome to quizzing.
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