How does our body know what to do and can schedule different processes when as a whole, a person can’t organise or schedule themselves?

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For eg: Most of the time, our bodies wake up, digest food, maintain hormone levels, defends itself, sends reminders when we need something etc. Individual organs are not intelligent but come together to form an “intelligent” human being. If processes on a smaller level work so well together, why are we as individuals so stupid, lazy and unorganised?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s a second you inside you. The “you” that you normally think of is your conscious mind. That’s the mind that thinks, provides a little voice in your head saying things like “hey she’s cute” or “I want a peanut” or “red light means stop”.

The other you, the subconscious mind, controls the autonomic nervous system, which makes your body do all the stuff it needs to do to keep you alive and functioning. Sometimes you can influence it (like when you hold your breath) but mostly it’s completely out of the control of the conscious mind.

You know how there’s all these processes on your computer doing stuff in the background like syncing your photos to iCloud, but all you see is your web browser? Same kind of thing.

You can see how there’s an evolutionary advantage to having the autonomic nervous system. Imagine if you *could* hold your breath as long as you wanted. You’d die of oxygen starvation. That’s not good.

From evolution’s standpoint, as long as we can live long enough to reproduce, job done. Doesn’t matter if we’re lazy, stupid, etc. We can still pass on our genes, and that’s good enough.

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