Klingon Brain Structure

[Klythe]

While discussing Discommendation the thought reoccured to me, that Klingons have to remember a lot more people and track thier fortunes.  My arguement was that when someone needed to be given discommendation but was not present, no ritual need to be performed.  But from that moment the discommended's name and crime would be publicised, and from that day on *every* Klingon would perform the discommendation ritual in the place of normal interaction.  
    For this to work, and indeed, for the whole Honor based society to operate correctly, each Klingon has to keep track of a lot of names, houses, associations and regional variances(and/or species/subspecies if your model of Klingon society includes non-Qo'noS Klingons).  Each of these has thier own fortunes to track, some interrealated, some not.  The Death of DuraS was a blow to his House, the pro-Romulan faction, but perhaps not to people form his birthplace.   Where as (to arbitrarily construct an example) Lord Kruge's death, as likely one of the more famous warriors born on the Fashrin hills[Pocket book canon], would likely have been a larger impact to thier political power.

    How much of this is stored in thier heads, and how much is left for the library computers for access when needed?   Does this require diffrent brain structures to store and access the required information on demand?  On it's face it seems like a human in Klingon society would use the same parts of the brain for gossiping or for following sports or politics.  Is this capability of 21st Century humans sufficient for your avarage gossip/sports fan/political wonk to get along or even excel in Klingon politics?   Would Klingons tend to have a brain structure more suited to this task than humans because of  survival pressures against politically ignorant Klingons?

    How much time do Klingons spend following the carreers of others?

    One Role Playing Game (Was it Heroes or d20?) had Klingons with 'lightning calculation' ability, which ment they could do complex math problems in thier heads, but fell short in other areas of intelligence.   Does this sit well with you or grate against your sense of what is Klingon?

*Thinks of yet another topic about klingon attudes about computers*  

[qoSagh]

Lightning Calculation......while I can see this skill being adapted well to the gosip/political tasks, I do not think that math would be a feature. Based on two things, first and formost the insult dwalsk - Calculating Machine, commonly used to label Vulcans. If Klingons were also dwalsk, it would be a compliment not an insult. The second would be House of Quark, remember that even with PADD's in front of them to show calculations, many High Council members showed an open distaste of such matters, even throwing the PADD's to the floor, hardly the attitude of a mathmatician.

Now we obviously know Klingons are intelligent, but I think that all brain power has been concentrated in different areas. Klingons would have a strong need to think tactically in advance of all battles, debates, house encounters. As has been put forth, they need to remember massive amounts about who is honorable and dishonorable at any given time. It seems to me that an engineer would need math skills, as would a navigator, but perhaps not other professions. Survival has probably played a huge part in this development.

Perhaps this explains why a race that seems like they would not have much use for computers, also seems to have well developed computers. The need is there to handle mundane tasks related to computations or calculations.

 

[netlhQIn]

Earlier human societies had bards and skalds who remembered dozens to hundreds of intricate and detailed stories relating to their theology/mythology and family histories, and those things also often included stories of (then) modern individuals and their deeds and misdeeds.  The human brain structure has not changed noticeably from then to now. 

I don't see any reason why a change in Klingon culture would have affected any kind of physiological change in their brain structure.

[Klythe]

    True, especially in societies where there is no written language, the only way to preserve knowledge is to pass on stories to be told one generation to the next.  But stories are static and unchanging, you can invest a week, a month or a year learning a story, and the story will still be the same from when you first learned it to when you tell it to your grandchildren for the last time on your death bed.   Whereas political fortunes can and often do change rapidly.  Klingon stories are not know for being memorized and recounted verbatim, but tend to take a life of their own with each retelling.  Some say the Klingons love to exhaggerate and embellish thier stories.

    Do Klingons keep track of thousands of warriors acrossed dozens of Houses?  Or is this a side effect of how Klingons are presented.   They all seem to know eachother and have heard stories of eachother's exploits.  Perhaps this is only our perception.  I remember hearing a story about a neural network Artificial Intelligence that researchers were training...  Letting it learn from reading reference materials, like dictionaries and encyclopedias and see what kind of conclusions it would draw about the world.  One of the surprising conclusions it came to was that 100% of people were famous, since of course the only people it was aware of were the famous ones it read about.  Perhaps we are only seeing the famous warriors that everyone hears about, and they are famous because we have heard about them.  Hehehheheh.

[netlhQIn]

Well, another terran example of an internal story-related social order is the Vampire larps, particularly the nation- or world-wide ones like One World by Night.  Regardless of whether you appreciate or loathe them, many people know tons of information about the characters of people half-way around the world, and can recount many tales.  And that's just a hobby.  I wouldn't doubt at all that such a thing could easily be incorporated into an actual culture.

[Klythe]

    Right, now take the small population of Vampire roleplayers, even globablly, and scale that up to the entire culture of a Galactic Empire.  Yes, it would have been easily incorporated into thier culture back when they had a small population with medieval-equivallent technologies living on a single world, then over the centuries their world expands to beyond Qo'noS, and technology improves so more people live in the same space.  That sill is a lot of stories to follow.   Granted a thousand years is probably far to short, especially with the Klingon lifepan being lengthened so that Kor, Kand and Koloth could still be around...