And We're Back

I have been gone. I have been gone in Japan. I have been gone and missing my blog. I didn't want to write while I was in Japan. The reason being that during the day I don't think I would do certain things if I knew that I was going to have to write about them later. I know this sounds bizarre ,but, about 75 percent of the things I do during a single day involve not brain activity whatsoever. For example, I am going to let the cat out of the bag here on this one, but during one night in Tokyo we were having sushi. As I was about so slide the delicious fish down my gullet I noticed a giant green ball of wasabi out of the corner of my eye. Without a single movement of my brain, I picked up the glowing ball with my chopsticks and threw it into my mouth. Exit brain thought, enter chaos. It didn't make sense and it shouldn't. As an "adult" now, I shouldn't be shoving balls of wasabi in my mouth just cause I saw it. Yet, I don't regret it personally. I am however, having to defend myself here and that is not something I wanted to do on a daily basis. So I just decided to forgo writing.

I am back now, so here I go.

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert attempted to answer why we are so fat?

We know that the simple answer is that we eat too much and don't exercise. We desire quantity and nix quality. Yet, Liz writes that in the old days people had smaller brains and therefore, required less food to fuel those brains. We as a people nowadays have larger brains and now need to eat more to fuel our brains.

She writes: "Brains are calorically demanding organs. Our distant ancestors had small ones. Australopithecus afarensis, for example, who lived some three million years ago, had a cranial capacity of about four hundred cubic centimetres, which is roughly the same as a chimpanzee’s. Modern humans have a cranial capacity of about thirteen hundred cubic centimetres."

My problem with Liz's hypothesis is this. If we have bigger brains to fuel now, shouldn't we be seeing smarter people? Cause I am just seeing the bigger bodies, yet it seems we are leaking common sense. I mean have you seen the hills? Seriously, Have you?