““But our brains are different from mice. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. They are built to run on innate rather than learned circuits. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it up with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on pre-loaded programs. Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they actually make it harder to survive. Neurons only promote survival if you really get your money’s worth out of them, by wiring them up with survival-relevant information. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons. That means we were meant to use the experience we’ve stored in our neurons, not to ignore””
