My cowerker was talking at meh about some Dateline report about such and such nasal spray drug may cause loss of sense of smell. That almost got me thinking... and then suddenly, it did. I wonder what the bioeconomics (not a real word) of getting rid of your smell and taste senses would be. Oxford style debate begins now!
Pro: As Americans we need to constantly be moving towards improved health and fitness. The deletion of increasingly detrimental peripheral senses such as taste and smell would be beneficial for two main reasons. The fast food industry has taken off by creating superstimuli-containing products that serve to overstimulate senses which have evolved over time for location of sources of nutrition. Unfortunately, as subjective experience benefits from only minimal discriminatory power the conditions in which these senses developed have increasingly been used against us. According to the CDC's death most recent statistics on the leading causes of death for Americans, a full 45% are directly attributable to these superstimulating diets (e.g. heart disease, stroke, and diabeetus; source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm). This is not to mention the potential for contributory causality in some cancers and secondary causality for CKD in both heart disease and diabeetus. Read this as you are equally likely to ultimately die from what you are eating as all other causes combined. We have progressed to the point that we can consciously decide what is healthy to eat independent of these outdated senses, and loss of pleasure in food would likely push the average diet more towards the healthy end of the spectrum this sentence feels like a runon what do you think? (Oh and caloric restriction is associated with longer healthy lifespan even in macaques). Any potential venue for mitigation of this epidemic should be investigated. Its so ez to do in practice too: just spray botulism toxin up your nose and cut off thine tongue with rusty shears in the bathroom.
Amateur: Changing the human condition so drastically immorally is tantamount... uh tant... wait... what the?! *buggered face*
Pro: A fully disparate potential avenue for goodifying ourselves is the fact that brain real estate is at maximum capacity in the short term. Thus to maximize competitive fitness psychosocial evolution must therefore supercede the reproductive flavor. In this vein, eliminating unnecessary and clearly detrimental sensory inputs would actually free up room (at least) in the quickly reassigned neocortical columns that had been occupied by taste and smell processing. This would allow additional networking of progressively iterative abstractions such as other sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. I, for one, clearly have too much neocortical resources assigned to language based on this blog.
Con: I mean "with".
The Oxford style I referred to in the jump was actually Oxford, Kentucky. Hope that clears up any rash you likely have.
Revised demographic: just me.
Should I add a picture? I am not finding one of rusty shares clipping off a tongue in a batheroom... hrmmm... Do me a favor and just imagine it. Kthx.
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