Imagine you have a plethora of important legal documents and folders (let’s not stress about what they are) and you’ve been told you have to fit them into a file cabinet. Furthermore, you will be utilizing these documents for a long time. The first idea that should come to your mind is organization. So, how will you organize these files? Likely, your first thought is to find patterns between these files. You’d look through the files, find some keywords and reappearing themes throughout the documents, and place them in the same file cabinet or folder. This hypothetical situation is nothing special–anyone would have thought to categorize the files. Pattern recognition is likely the easiest and earliest concept in the human brain. It even happens subconsciously. As a child, you don’t consciously learn a language, but you pick it up merely by hearing adults around you communicate. Basically, organization is one of the most natural and significant human behaviors.
However, it must be recognized that within everything you do, there is a sense of wonder, no matter what it may be. This system of organization we’ve created within society and within our minds is something exceptional because humans are essentially anomalies. There is no other organism on earth that possess the capabilities we do, and that raises the question of… why?
Most people understand that other animals (even the ones bigger than us) have less capability than us. Even the elephant, with more than 200 billion neurons, 3 times that of humans, is not as smart as us. It’s an intriguing idea that researchers get closer to figuring out by the day, but of course it’s not an easy topic to figure out. There are many different facts and variables that have to come together to answer a question this complex. Today, while searching the internet, I found an interesting article that provides a deeper insight into this question; it most certainly has to do with organization. The article in mind is from phys.org, which explains a research article in the Public Library of Science. The essence of the study conducted has to do with bonobos, one of our closest biological relatives. The most important detail is that bonobos have issues with sequences; they are unable to properly learn the order of specific stimuli. This suggests that the reason animals may be due to the inability to understand sequences.
I didn’t think much of it, but a few minutes later it blew my mind. Essentially, I thought about it in this way: If animals can’t remember the sequence of stimuli, then they can’t remember the sequence of events. Imagine what life would be like if you were able to remember tons of events, but you could not place them in order. A lack of sequential memory would be debilitating for humans for multiple reasons:
- If you can’t remember the order of events, it’s extremely hard to figure out cause and effect. It is hard to figure out what causes what when you are unable to figure out which event came before the other.
- If you can’t understand sequences, math becomes almost impossible. Sequences aren’t just chronological, meaning that even the simple math order of PEMDAS would cease to exist in the human mind.
- A lack of understanding sequences is correlated to a lack of understanding about time. You may be able to remember previous events based on prior data like sight, smell, or hearing, but you will not know when it takes place. This means changing facts and information would be very confusing. If you didn’t have sequential memory, and let’s say we’re in a time where people believe in the heliocentric model. If I tell you one day that the world is actually a geocentric model, you may have trouble because you do not know when I have told you each thing. How do you know which is true at the moment? Granted, this is not a perfect example, but my point stands.
These are some fascinating points, but the central idea of most of these is that sequential memory is a key cause of human intelligence. This is likely due to the fact that humans have better long term and short-term memory than other mammals. The human brain pieces together memories by piecing together information from different parts of the brain that process different things. What you saw comes from a different place in the brain than what you heard, but the brain puts these stimuli together and creates the memory. Maybe brain is powerful enough to use details from these memories and stimuli in order to figure out the sequence of stimuli. Maybe our understanding of order and sequence is what helps us put together a memory. Maybe it has little direct effect on memories, and it helps more within logic, like figuring out patterns. As time goes on, hopefully we will find more information to clarify this. Understanding how the human brain works will be key to understanding philosophy, neurology, and many other fields.
Links I looked at while researching this:
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-distinguishes-humans-animals.html
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0290546#sec017
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661324002699
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fmcc-intropsychmaster-2/chapter/what-is-cognition/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/topics/memory
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2023/10/26/how-do-our-brains-classify-similar-objects-new-theory-works-out-the-details/
https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/01/26/bonobos-and-chimps-memory-study/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1955772/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3709834/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4053853/