The brain's evolutionary balancing act between storage, connectivity, data processing, and the free exchange of ideas.
Increasing brain size is credited as the key feature that propelled us from tree-climbing ape to space-traveling modern human. But is intelligence really just about an increase in brain mass?
Human intelligence has been shaped by the brain's delicate balancing act between data storage and data processing capability. But data storage can be outsourced. By talking to our friends and neighbors, reading books, doing a Google Search, or looking something up on Wikipedia, we've changed the rules of the evolutionary game so that memorization isn't as important as it used to be. It's creativity - finding useful patterns in the flood of data - that gives us an evolutionary edge in the modern world.
As a result, evolutionary pressure is gradually swinging away from data storage and towards more efficient data processing and more creative problem-solving. This is, quite literally, reshaping the way our brains are structured.