Here’s a surprise: the human brain consumes 20% or more of the calories of a typical person. There is evidence that for brain-intensive work, it goes even higher. When you realize that just three or four calories can produce a giant flame (skip to 2:40) we are talking serious energy behind every thought you think. In fact, dealing with the heat load from the brain was a major bottleneck in human evolution.
Let me state this a different way. Nature has decided that for every human that the planet supports, at least twenty percent of the food energy we can scrape together is going to go to information processing — planning, remembering, analyzing, communicating — rather than actually doing stuff. And this is before we spend a dime on technology, not to mention consultants and other brain workers whose bodies aren’t used that much.
Energy Net on 25 Oct 08Informing individuals about the resource use and environmental consequences of their energy consumption can be surprisingly difficult. Do you ever read the little flyers that your utility or your energy retailer puts in your bill? Nope, I don't either. But in general we're pretty clueless about our energy consumption, because we do not have timely information that shows us how much we're using, and how much we're spending, so we have little incentive to go out and find information about energy efficiency. Even my students, undergrads and MBAs at one of the best universities in the world, don't generally realize that, for example, 90% of the energy used in an incandescent light bulb produces waste heat, not lumens. In part the challenge is that it's an information push, and it's an information push in an over-informed world. Consumers rarely go out looking for ways to save energy (although $4 gas and possible recession have increased that information pull!).
