What kind of world would drive brains to evolve high-throughput sensory?
Here on "Earth" organisms tend to evolve only enough mental processing power to handle sensory inputs in modest amounts. Taking "human" brains for a quick example, even though we have millions of sensory receptors all over our body that can feed touch, smell, visual and audio information to our brain, most of the time our brain "tunes out" this information. Clearly, if one was too absorbed in all the rustling of the leaves and scents in the air, he or she would be more likely to remove him/herself from the gene pool by failing to prioritize the important thump thump thump of a charging tiger.
So flipping the script, let's concede right now that this idea seems counter-intuitive on Earth, because it's cost-prohibitive in terms of energy. If a brain is processing things that are not necessary to survive, the plausibility of the species is questionable. But perhaps this is only the case on Earth -- which brings me to my question.
Question
What kind of environment/evolutionary narrative would need to be assumed to allow for high-throughput sensory brains to become a favored trait? That is to say, we are maximizing the amount of sensory inputs that make it to the conscious level.
Further Clarifications:
- High-throughput sensory brains: All information is preserved and the brain does not "zone out" any "noise." It feels everything from every sensory receptor and passes it to the conscious mind frequently.
- Number of sensory receptors: assumed to be very high. (hence the post title: high-throughput)
- Preference: world with a viable food chain in which high-throughput sensory brains have reached high ranks.
- World: Optional. If you have an Earth-like evolutionary narrative for high-throughput sensory brains, feel free. Otherwise, explain the assumptions of your world.
- Everything else: only limit is the laws of physics. I will allow for hypothetical biology.
Side: I will include a quote that a rather like as an optional supplement to the post. Originally, I accredited it to Darwin, but I was mistaken. While not widely accepted, it's still an interesting quote.
It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It's the species that responds fastest to change.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/151434. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Automated sensory selectivity, i.e. not passing sensory data to the conscious mind, is the result of evolution. Certain sensory inputs have been deemed irrelevant and thus placed in a sort of second tier data, which is passed to the conscious mind only if you focus on it.
Other answers have provided the obvious explanation that this effect is due to an economy of energy and the need for quick responses to environmental anomalies, which could indicate presence of predators, immediate danger, or simply a new and unknown situation.
To prevent this filtering to happen before conscious processing, you may want to avoid any input to be associated with anything usual. I will call this the Schrodinger world, whereby it is impossible to know from environmental cues alone what situation we are in, e.g. whether of danger or safety.
As no specific combination of sensory data can be disregarded over other combinations, two evolutionary parts are likely:
- energetically cheap: no sensory data is processed.
- energetically expensive: all data is passed to the conscious part of the brain, which has to add non sensory information to decide.
It is a bit complicated to imagine a scenario in which all sensory data is not sufficient to determine the chance of a situation being free of danger, and yet not being completely useless.
To allow such scenario I'd go with peacock-humans, who display all their sensory appendages in a world where they serve no purpose, only to gain a mating advantage: perceiving more of the world is also being perceived more. Mating among such humans is a conscious battle in the entire sensory spectrum, like a chess game in which the defeated candidate retreats after realizing they have no valid responses to the opponent nuances.
Why wouldn't this mating dance be handled by the subconscious over evolutionary time scales? The ever changing nature of the Schrodinger world is such that repeatable behavior is penalized. A predator may be lurking for mating humans that display the same patterns over and over, thus keeping their numbers dwindling, as opposed to the very successful conscious-peacock humans.
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