Blonde's eye view

By John Hill on March 6, 2008 2:13 PM |

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Blonde's Eye View - Stand-up Cherry Green's weekly word on the Wharf

The human brain is a masterpiece of evolution and engineering.
The autonomic nervous system can control hundreds of body functions unconsciously from breathing to focusing and refocusing the eye or regulating body temperature.
Not only does it have the capacity for all of this, plus doing hard sums, we have developed speech, and thanks to the frontal lobe, higher consciousness and a sense of self. Humans are thought to be the only animal that ‘knows’ it exists.
So can someone please tell me why, with this phenomenally sophisticated machine rattling around in their craniums, there are so many people who are astonishingly stupid?

They are everywhere. You will meet one today, I guarantee it. I’ve already met mine. A woman walked into the lift in front of around six people, pressed the button for her floor and then opted to stand in front of the
buttons as everyone else filed in.
Like a good stupid person, she elected to look utterly affronted when several people moved her to press their button. And every time, she stepped aside, them moved back in front of the buttons again.
I’ll put my hand up and admit that I have done the odd stupid thing. Until embarrassingly recently I thought that Waterloo station was built on the site of the Battle of Waterloo.
Plus, thanks to an 80s children’s cartoon, I thought the three musketeers were accompanied by Dogtanian. But I still rather fancy that I have the cognitive powers to work out that standing in the stairwell of a double-decker bus is not a clever thing.
Alarmingly, this seems to put me in the upper quartile of human intelligence as far as I can see. Perhaps the human brain is so busy with peristalsis it sometimes doesn’t tell its body that it might be an idea to get the Oyster card out BEFORE reaching the turnstiles rather than standing in them searching through pockets while people bottleneck behind it.
Honestly!