In the game of life, attention is the most valuable resource. A unit of attention can be referred to as brain cycles. Unlike GPUs and CPUs that can be measured in terms of compute cycles. Attention cannot be quantified. How much attention did you pay? That question is unanswerable.
Brains cannot scale like GPUs. You cannot implant two brains and think twice as fast. But calculation done by some/other person can be communicated through words. Language provides solution to brain scaling problem. Language also solves problem of memory. Therefore primary thing a child is taught is to speak, read and write. It is like connecting a computer with internet.
Cached knowledge. Cache is the result of earlier computation and stored for future reference. Cache knowledge verified by other minds become objective truth on which one can further expand the knowledge base. That is the way of science progresses. A single human would not be able to compute most things.
Thinking is the process of spending brain cycles and using cache knowledge to solve current problem. If you focus on a problem with enough time and resources you will be able to solve it. Where humans collectively pay attention that fields improve.
Human transfer knowledge through communication. Story and spoken words were used to pass information from one generation to next. Skills such as black smith, gold smith, farming, etc. were taught from father to son or master to apprentice. There was no way for distributing knowledge through time and space.
Writing first came to clay tablets then to paper. With advent of printing press, knowledge could be mass produce. Writing and storing things became a way to exchange knowledge quickly. Now a person in china could write about gun powder to be used by European to invent guns.
Child in early years observes and collects data. Parents and society provides good framework and tools to further expand his knowledge base. School teaches important calculation and tools. For any human to function and contribute he must first spend some brain cycles to learn about the previous generation�s knowledge and their tools. Currency=attention + trust.
Life is multiplayer game. One needs to transact with others to play. So you need to use use brain cycles and skills to produce goods. You can then also exchange good. As barter system was inefficient, currency started to be used for transacting.
You will be paid in proportion to how much your goods or services are valued. Knowledge is the force multiplier to brain cycles. Therefore parents aims to provide child skills that help him. Society incentivize to push each child to increase its position on hierarchy thus pushing society to the new boundaries.
IQ scores were develop as a way to test students but they are now use to test adults. There are jobs that need you to pass the IQ test. Although efficacy of such test is still debated. IQ is good measure of efficiency brain cycles.(vertasium)
Working memory is also predictive of quality of brain cycles. Working memory here refer to the brain ability to hold multiple things in short term memory while doing some sort of computation on that. There is research that we have a limit of 5(+/-2) things in memory.(dual n back)
Everybody with sufficient mental capacity can do great work but very few dare to accomplish anything meaningful. People nowadays are not willing to think too deeply about a concept or a problem. To understand any concept you need to think about it from multiple angles and connect it with things that already exist in your mind.Will to think(nabeel )
We have enough to pleasure ourselves with. We have plenty of cognitive surplus. So we have invented new ways to distract ourselves with. There are this media corporation and social media companies that uses your brain cycles in order to earn profits
Cheap dopamine is the abundant all around us. As Naval Ravikant said �The modern devil is cheap dopamine�. With the rise of short form content our brains are almost always preoccupied with things that are not important to us. Short form is the wrong kind of munching. Boredom is quite extinct.