Why We May Think

When I was young, I thought the point of the body was to protect the brain. Now I realize it’s the other way around. The brain exists to protect the body.

There are two kinds of animals – those who move and those who don’t.

Animals who don’t move count on a stable and predictable environment and replicate like crazy to compete for scarce resources, and to outlast environmental changes.

Animals who do move have to adapt to ever-changing environments, and therefore need a central nervous system.

We call the first set of animals “plants.”

If you move, your environment changes a lot, which means you need a nervous system to detect and respond to those changes. So, your brain exists to protect your body as it moves, and it does this by constantly trying to predict the environment around it.

Stop predicting, and you may as well be a plant, except unlike that plant you haven’t cloned yourself a million times. You were counting on one shot at reproduction with sexual mutation to make up for one million shots with random mutation…and you lose.

So, keep moving, and be alert.