This computational efficiency is the single most astonishing fact of the mammalian brain. Here you are, reading these words, daydreaming about lunch, processing the richness of reality, thinking about tomorrow, and your brain requires less energy than a low wattage light bulb. Evolution is an impressive engineer.
Makes you feel kind of impressed with yourself, right? "I'm the most efficient, complex, powerful machination this world has ever known." And then there's this from Norman Gates' blog:
Suppose you read four books a week every week for 70 years. Allowing for a day here and there where you're unable to read, we can call that 200 books a year, and 14,000 books over the whole three score years and ten. It's a lot of books. But relative to all the books there are, it's a tiny, tiny fraction. According to the guy who manages the Google Books metadata team, at the latest count the books in the world now total 168,178,719. Your 14,000 books are just 0.008324477724 per cent of that.
You want a reason why people, in joining together, change the world? Because you, in all of your glory, can read eight-thousandths of the worlds collective knowledge in your lifetime. And there is too much with the short time you're given than to just sit there reading.
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