The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has been prominent in arguing that our new digital lives are profoundly altering the structure of our brains. This is undoubtedly the case – but then all human activities impact upon the individual brain as they’re happening; this by no means implies a permanent alteration, let alone a heritable one. After all, so far as we can tell the gross neural anatomy of the human has remained unchanged for hundreds of millennia, while the age of bi-directional digital media only properly dates – in my view – from the inception of wireless broadband in the early 2000s, hardly enough time for natural selection to get to work on the adaptive advantages of … tweeting. Nevertheless, pioneering studies have long since shown that licensed London cab drivers, who’ve completed the exhaustive “Knowledge” (which consists of memorising every street and notable building within a six mile radius of Charing Cross), have considerably enlarged posterior hippocampi.
This is the part of brain concerned with way-finding, but it’s also strongly implicated in memory formation; neuroscientists are now discovering that at the cognitive level all three abilities – memory, location, and narration – are intimately bound up. This, too, is hardly surprising: key for humans, throughout their long pre-history as hunter-gatherers, has been the ability to find food, remember where food is and tell the others about it. It’s strange, of course, to think of Pride and Prejudice or Ulysses as simply elaborations upon our biologically determined inclination to give people directions – but then it’s perhaps stranger still to realise that sustained use of satellite navigation, combined with absorbing all our narrative requirements in pictorial rather written form, may transform us into miserable and disoriented amnesiacs.
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15 comments:
Did did you say something?
A little early to start making pronouncements.
This stuff is only 10 years old.
Oh, pooh. As long as there are Kardashians and police procedurals we will have narratives. And it will take another few million years to erase the ongoing internal narrative that one is the star of.
Isn't that Lysenko-ism...the idea that changing external behavior results in internal structural changes?
I've read that if you're feeling low and you paste a smile on your face and keep it there, your nerves will tell your brain that's how you feel...
For perspective, it's important to remember that human technology is shaped far more by the requirements and preferences of our brains, than the other way around. We build the stuff to fit our needs, support our limitations, and we keep adjusting it to make it work better with the brains we have. Maybe a short attention span is who we really are, and have always been.
Storytelling might be the horse of information technology: around forever, indispensable to our success, highly romanticized, but once gone, hardly missed. I think twitter is the blimp: short-lived, severely limited, and soon to be dropped for something better, a dead end.
"Storytelling might be the horse of information technology: around forever, indispensable to our success, highly romanticized, but once gone, hardly missed."
Hard to imagine that it will go away. I can see the novel becoming an esoteric form, or written stories, in general, but film, tv, song, etc., I think will remain.
Not once we can hook up to the emotion generator that will instantly make us feel like we just watched a great movie and simultaneously download the associated data to our brains as if we watched it. 2 seconds and Ben Hur is yours.
You will be able to make yourself a wingnut or a far left extremist if you want know what that's like for a day. Just remember to erase it when the ride is over.
Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories?
I do not understand the question as I do not see how humans evolved up to the need to tell stories.
I must be missing something.
Bago at 423, but you've still seen, and wanted to see, a narrative. Regardless of how it is delivered.
Language and story telling are coeval. How could they not be? "I go. Hide. See animal. Big. Throw spear. He die. Me drag home. Everybody. Look me." What good risking life and limb if you couldn't brag about it. The first story.
Speaking of the gross neural anatomy of the human brain, I'm reading a book for the first time in two or three years. By book, I mean paper and ink, not Kindle. I keep reaching my finger towards the page to touch a word so that the dictionary will pop up with a definition. So far it hasn't worked.
Is this the beginning of the end?
I've been reading about gene expression and the evolution of wolves into dogs. Theory is that environmental (living with humans and not in the wild as one example) conditions turned on some genes that changed the behavior of the wolf. I began to wonder about gene activation in humans.
We already know kids, from use of phones and controllers, are using their thumbs in situations where we older people might be more likely to use our index finger. That right there involves different neuron pathways in the brain. Who knows what else the new environments are doing to us?
I've only learned enough to speculate with incomplete information which is fun but tends to be wrong. Still, I continue to wonder "what if?"
ricpic, I thought of the caveman story about an hour before you...yes that would have been one of the first ones...men! I guess the original use of language was conveying information...as in"sssss!" for snake. Did language immediately morph and take off like the IT revolution?
Christy, good pickup on the dog gene expression. Maybe things won't take that long. The kid who trimmed my mom's hedge constantly looked at his iphone. At my cousin's kid's basketball game, he's was about eight, immediately after the game he wanted his phone.
Everything's going to happen very fast.
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