Here’s an interesting thing:
The decrease was identified during the Holocene era when human began to form social groups instead of living individually. This allowed them to share information instead of storing it.
By that process, modern brains must be shrinking exponentially as the Internet Effect becomes information-sharing on steroids.
Which would explain rap music and TikTok “influencers”.
Its the “Star Trek” effect.
There’s a goofy episode where the otherwise mouth breathing women of a planet can don a helmet connected to a computer and instantly become enabled to perform a complex task.
After a time they revert back to being mouth breathers without retaining the knowledge they briefly acquired.
A sci-fi presentation of YouTube how-to videos thirtyish years ahead of their existence.
“Brain and brain! What is brain?”
It goes without saying that Spock’s Brain is a 3rd-season episode.
At least it was the first episode of that season, so they were trying to warn us, even if we wouldn’t listen. LOL
Strange though how something so prophetic would come from such a bad episode.
“Spock’s Brain” is a silly episode, but it gets far more derision than it deserves. First of all, one can convincingly argue that it was intended to be funny, in the same way that “I, Mudd” was. Lines like “Brain and brain! What is brain?” do not just happen by accident.
Second, there are a number of worse episodes of the Original Series. One example is “The Mark of Gideon,” in which we are asked to believe in a world that is so desperately overpopulated that the entire society teeters on the brink of collapse. This would normally involve critical shortages of many important resources, but this society nevertheless has the resources to build a complete, full-scale, and fully-functional replica of the starship Enterprise. (Elsewhere in the episode, it is established that the surface of the planet Gideon is so densely packed with people that there is no place where a person can find solitude. Yet they have space for a fake starship 288.6 meters long and 72.6 meters tall.)
Kirk is abducted and place on the fake Enterprise as part of a convoluted scheme to convince him to donate the viruses for a deadly disease that he carries in his bloodstream (and is immune to), so that they can deliberately create epidemics to kill billions of their own people as a form of population control. Why don’t they use contraception? Because their “love of life” makes it unthinkable to them. (But epidemics are perfectly fine.) The stupidest aspect of this story is that Kirk was rendered unconscious for a few minutes when they abducted him, and during that time, they took a sample of his blood. They ALREADY HAVE what they need, which makes the entire subterfuge, and the fake Enterprise, completely unnecessary.
“The Mark of Gideon” makes no sense, and unlike “Spock’s Brain,” it isn’t remotely funny. In fact, the whole episode is so deadly serious, and so completely lacking in any action, that it’s just BORING.
Even worse is “The Alternative Factor,” but I won’t waste your time picking apart the plot of the episode, because it doesn’t have one. It’s so incoherent and nonsensical that I defy anyone to explain what is actually going on. The episode isn’t even consistent from one scene to the next. I have sometimes wondered if it was edited by writing the title of each scene on an index card, throwing the stack of cards down a flight of stairs, gathering them up, and then editing the scenes together in that order. That’s how incomprehensible it is — and it’s also not remotely funny. In fact, we’re asked to believe that the fate of two universes depends on the outcome of this gibberish. Deadly serious, again. Except that the episode never manages to explain the nature of the threat in any way that makes sense, so we end up rolling our eyes and mumbling, “Whatever.”
So let’s cut “Spock’s Brain” some slack. At least it’s fun to watch.
“We need a script for next week! ”
“Any ideas? I’m fresh out.”
Ummm, I know! “Kirk falls in love.”
“No that was last week!”
“Spock falls in love.”
“That was three weeks ago.”
“Chekov gets scared.”
“That happens every week!”
“I know! Scotty falls in love!”
“Ok, but let’s make it interesting this time.”
“He falls in love with a librarian!”
Merciful Heavens, they got canceled just in time.
Junk science —
Correlation is not causation. Far too many other factors may be involved, and no possibility of a control group.
tik-tok & rap.
One must be careful in assigning stupidity here. The tik-tok ‘influencers’ and rap ‘musicians’ are very clever folk.
It’s the followers and listeners that are the LoFo, Lo-IQ dumbasses, suckers one and all, and it would be immoral to let them keep their money.
I’m pretty sure humans started living in social groups longer than 3,000 years ago, the first city/states dating from at least twice that long ago, and humans living in tribal/family groups pretty much from the beginning. Hell, the pyramids of Giza are older than that.
Mark D