The Purposes of Brains and Thoughts

Most of the activity our brains engage in modulate processes that enable us to exist and survive i.e. acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire and distribute oxygen around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this breathing in air, separating out the oxygen that is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives ending by breathing out, carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide being then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breath to complete the cycle from Gaia’s perspective

Similarly our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We ingest this and the brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use together with oxygen to create the energy needed for muscle to function. The unused ingested material is excreted out into the environment where it is re-cycled as water and nitrogenous material to be used as food for plants.

Without the cardiovascular and digestive systems we could not survive at all. Much of our spinal cord and lower brain is engaged in supporting the processes required to keep these in being and co-ordinated. However humans have additional capacities. We have the ability to move in co-ordination with others to acquire the food needed to survive and without the speech memory and planning we use to be very effective at this we would not be human.

Different parts of our brain have distinct roles in each of these activities. They represent successive needs in the evolution of living beings and to an extent exist in all animals. In reptiles the last two are little developed while in mammals one finds the sensing and co-ordination function developed though not necessarily the planning and thinking parts. The latter are only really well developed in man though apes and some whales have similar large areas of brain.

Our brain with that of other living things has evolved over eons and as evolution adapts to what exists the old is not destroyed or replaced but accommodated. In consequence the human nervous system has features shared with the nervous systems of all other animals. One might then expect the planet’s brain to evolve similarly with ancient parts driving basic functions, eating procreating, moving; later parts evolved to improve sensing and co-ordination; modern parts evolved to think and plan.