To be honest I’d wonder if the genetic lottery could make a fluffy smart enough that it was actually a problem. Or more to the point, self aware enough to realize futility, know despair, and give up.
On a long enough timeline, I’d suspect fluffies would probably lose their intelligence rather than have it increased. It’s the fandom having a lark, but the fact is that it basically provides no real use or benefit to them outside of being a pet communicating with an owner/owners, and is an active detriment to them when they’re by themselves. Evolution would probably still let them keep the greater memory retention, I think, but the ones that will survive are likely to be those that can blend in the best since it means that they’ll survive much longer in places where eye searing colors can get you snapped up by wildlife.
Depending on the head canon, I could even see their brains potentially be an impairment to higher development given that the programming potentially has the limiting effect of only giving them the express phrases they were designed with in mind (miwkies, mummah, wuv, huggies, etc.). This is probably most evident in some stories where we can see that wild fluffies tend to have much smaller vocabularies, using compound words from their preexisting stock phrases, whereas ones that spend more time around people will be able to absorb new information as well as retain it with ready supplies of food.
Hard to say. The mind, as well as sentience, seem to be super fragile.
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Ugh, this term. I hate how it turned from something specifically meant to describe neurological differences into just another stupid and unnecessary euphemism for mentally ill people. I’ve even seen idiots apply it to fucking cluster B personality disorders.
There is no way in hell I’d ever associate my Aspergers (which I’m proud of) with actual mental illnesses. They are apples and oranges.
“Neurodivergent” is up there with “plus-sized” and “differently abled” in terms of stupidity now, and with “curvy” in terms of blatant misappropriation.
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