8 Comments
User's avatar
Nick Herman's avatar

“ We don’t yet know why walking promotes problem-solving. That research is still in play..”

Hmm, yes, how could this activity that we’ve been doing as a daily activity, in long bursts, for our survival for 99% of human and humanoid evolution, have anything to do with our mental capacities? Evolution? What’s that? 😀

Expand full comment
Ellen Jackson's avatar

😂 I probably should have said 'we don't know how it promotes problem solving' - in that we don't fully understand the links between the physical movement and the cognitive result. Not yet anyway!

Expand full comment
Nick Herman's avatar

I think we know a lot of these things in terms of experiential knowledge. In terms of when we’ll know them in a “scientific” way, my guess is not likely in our lifetime, given that neuroscience has made virtually no progress beyond the level of low level linear thinking/deterministic cell biology paradigms since I made the decision not to go into it, 20 years ago.

Expand full comment
Ellen Jackson's avatar

Yet it always astounds me how much we've learned - and how little we must have known - before fMRIs 😲

Expand full comment
Nick Herman's avatar

I don’t know if you saw, but on one of Erik Hoel’s recent posts about consciousness, he more or less showed that the majority of studied that use or cite fmri research are basically garbage, and most “results” are not really Better than random noise. This was the same post where he said neuroscience research basically peaked in the 90s, and citations from papers since then have not really gone up much, relatively.

Expand full comment
Ellen Jackson's avatar

Haven't seen it. Will take a look. Thanks for the tip. Still early days for brain science. Progress likely needs to be measured in decades rather than years (but I'm a bit older than Erik Hoel. I've seen a couple more decades 😉) I'd love to see where we are in 100 years!

Expand full comment
Nick Herman's avatar

Me too—hopefully in a place where people can simultaneously tap more into the long history and wisdom of the thousands of generations before us, rather than saying things like, “I like to exercise because it gets my endorphins going!”

🤦

Expand full comment