PLASTIC BRAINS

Dick Pountain/Idealog 282/05 January 2018 15:06

Feels to me as though we're on the brink of a moral panic about overdependence on social media (particularly by children), and part of it hangs on the question "are digital media changing the way we think?" The wind-chill is sufficient to have Mark Zuckerberg sounding defensive instead of chipper, while several ex-Facebook gurus have gone almost gothic: Sean Parker believes the platform “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” while Chamath Palihapitiya goes the whole hog with “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”. 

Now I'm as partial to a shot of dopamine as the next person - I take mine mostly in the form of Flickr faves - and have also been known to favour destroying how society works a little bit. However I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit this one out because I firmly believe that *almost everything the human race has ever invented* changed the wiring of our brains and the way we think, and that this one isn't even really one of the biggest. For example discovering how to make fire permitted us to cook our food, making nutrients more quickly available and enabling our brains to evolve to far larger size than other primates'. When we invented languages we created a world of things-with-names that few, probably no, other animals inhabit, allowing us to accumulate and pass on knowledge. Paper, the printing press, the telegraph, eventually, er, Facebook. 

One of the most intriguing books I've ever read is “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976) by the late Julian Jaynes, a US professor of psychology. He speculated that during the thousands of years between the acquisition of speech and of writing around 1000BC our minds were structured quite differently from now, that all our thoughts were dialogues between two voices, our own and a second commanding voice that continually told us what to do. These second voices were in fact the voices of parents, tribal leaders and kings internalised during infancy, but we experienced them as the voices of gods - hence the origin of religion. Physiologically it was the result of fully experiencing both brain hemispheres, with the right one semi-autonomous and conversing internally with the left. Writing and written law eventually rewired this ancient mind structure, leaving us with the minds we now possess which experience autonomy, the voice of gods being relegated to the less insistent voice of conscience which we understand belongs to us (unless we suffer from schizophrenia) and may ignore if we choose to. 

Crazy? Plausible? Explanatory? Testable? It's well-written and deeply researched, so much so that Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion” says it's “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.” Me too. 

A rather slimmer book I just read - "Why Only Us, Language and Evolution" by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky - is equally mind-boggling. Their argument is too complex to explain here, related to Chomsky's perennial concern with the deep structure of language, what's inherited and what's learned. Recent research in evolutionary developmental neurobiology suggests that a single mutation is sufficient to differentiate our language-capable brains from those of other primates: an operation the authors call "Merge" which combines mental symbols in hierarchical rather than merely sequential fashion. Our languages go beyond other animal communication systems because they permit infinite combinations of symbols and hence the mental creation of possible worlds. Birds create new songs by stringing together chains of snippets: we absorb the syntax of our various languages via trees rather than chains. Language arrived thanks to a change in our brain wiring and it lets us think via the voice in our head. 

We used to believe that our brain wiring got fixed during the first three or four years of life, while we learned to walk and talk, then remained static throughout adulthood: we now know better. Learning, say, to play the cello or to memorise London streets as a cabby detectably alters brain structure. Our ever-increasing dependency on Sat Nav to navigate from A to B may be jeopardising our ability to visualise whole territories, by shrinking it down to a collection of "strip maps" of individual routes. Fine so long as you remain on the strip, not so if one wrong turn sends you into a lake. Were a war to destroy the GPS satellites we'd end up running around like a kicked ant's nest. Being rude, or liking, each other on Facebook really is some way from being the worst risk we face.