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I think that brain one was from a game of telephone with the real fact that a large portion of our brain is dedicated to image processing and object identification. Another portion would be dedicated to sound recognition with a decent amount of circuitry going into the recognition and parsing of speech. Memory will also take up some of the capacity as well as mapping desired actions to sequences of signals for muscle activation. After all the things our brains need to do just to accomplish all these things we take for granted are accounted for, it doesn’t leave much capacity left over for thought.
Though, at least in my experience, the most powerful analysis the brain can do is in the subconscious. So many times I’ve faced a difficult problem where I’ve been unable to make any progress, take a break, then later return to a much easier problem. Or even with skill development, try doing something too hard for a bit, then sleep on it and try again the next day and it might suddenly be easier. This works best for dexterity skills, I’ve noticed it a lot in Beat Saber.
So it’s like you can take whatever was left over from the first paragraph, then take a small amount of that and that’s your conscious thought capacity and the rest is given to subconscious processing.
It’s the same mindset that lead to using dispersants on the oil spilled by deep horizon. It’s not about science, it’s about dealing with a problem that has no easy good solution, so instead of a good solution, just something is done.
Oil companies probably thought that people would be more resistant to buying oil if it needed special effort to dispose of properly. Maybe they didn’t even have a good way of dealing with it at that time and just hadn’t dumped enough of it yet to realize that it would eventually run down into the water table. Though going by how they handled realizing that burning oil at all was going to have a huge effect on climate, they likely wouldn’t have cared even if they did know.
Just like deep horizon wasn’t an environmental problem for BP but a PR one, thus they selected solutions that looked like they were trying, that they shouldn’t be liquidated to fund a real cleanup effort, and that new deep water oil wells were still worth the risk. Think of all the retirees that they are holding hostage because they put money towards funds that bought BP stock and derivatives!