Limits of our biology

The world is complex and filled with different informations. We receive millions of them per second through our senses. That is way too much to process in any way. Maybe if we had supercomputers or nutritionally unsustainable large brain, we could. But that would be very inefficient and innecessary. Nature -as always- came up with a much better solution to the problem.

The filters

Instead of processing everything, our brain only focuses on relevant things. Filters out every bit, which is not interesting at the moment. For example you will completely miss a falling leaf in front of your eyes if a bear runs towards you from the same direction. We have filters for every sense we use.

Biological filters, like eyes which can see a narrow part of our surroundings. The tongue, or fingers, which can only feel on contact. Or the inner ears which can only translate a range of vibrations to the brain.

On the other hand we have neurological filters. They work with the raw information from the sensory devices. They drop every irrelevant parts, and they do this without us noticing. They have to, because processing information is very resource hungry, not to mention conscious decision making. If we had to decide which sound or light ray is important, we couldn't focus on more complex problems.

These filters work tirelessly every second of our life, even when we sleep. They work by recognizing small patterns in the raw incoming data. A certain series of sound waves, or an moving thing in the corner of the eyes. If a patterns is deemed interesting, it goes forward to real processing. If not, it gets discarded.

The feedback loop

What is interesting is how they get those patterns. Of course, by learning. A baby you just see a bunch of stains and lights, and they don't make any sense, but as the baby uses its eyes and provides more and more sampley to the brain, the blurs begin to form into shapes. If the baby likes a cube (an interesting shape), its brain will be more effective at recognizing the shape, and that filter will allow for faster pass on sight.

These are basics of sensory inputs and information filtering. You learn important things by focusing on things, then when you are good at it, your brain will do it for you unconsciously. But if you don't use or don't care about something your brain will slowly filters out as innecessary.

The problem

This operation states a very glaring problem. An its the snowball effect. If you concentrate on a few things in your life, those things will come to front and the rest will erode, and you simply lose the capability you had earlier. Of course you can relearn things, but the point is that you lose those things not in constant use. The neurons disconnect slowly so its not an overnight event, but a constant transformation.

Conclusion

Always pay attention on what aspects of life is important to you as they can fade away and you won't even notice just when its too late. Its good to focus on your crypto portfolio, but don't let it take over your whole life. You have a profession, a family, friends, hobbies. All of them are necessary. Take care of them.

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