A sobering neurological fact seems to have gone over the heads of many ministers, commentators and civil servants: the human brain is changing. It has always been evolving, of course, but this time we are facing the biggest alterations since the demise of our cousins, the Neanderthals, tens of millennia ago. We are seeing new behaviours and thought patterns emerging that amount to nothing less than a different kind of person.
The computer screen is now ubiquitous. Governments see information technology as a way to make society quicker-witted and smarter. I am no Luddite and I support this advance. But what worries me is that the computer is fast becoming a substitute for the flesh-and-blood world of human contact and abstract thought for many people.
We could be sleepwalking into a new world of technology without even considering what it is doing to the way we think.
Messy, face-to-face interaction, with its pheromones, hormones, body language, immediacy and above all unpredictability, will become an unpalatable alternative to a remote, online, sanitised and solitary cyber-persona and life. The consequence is that our very identity as human beings is under threat from life in the new virtual world. The challenge posed by this change is as big a crisis as the threat climate change poses to our outer world.
My concerns stem from two givens: the malleability of the human brain, and the conspicuously pervasive and invasive quality of 21st-century technology.
Muscle bound
Think of the brain like a muscle that can be altered in response to how hard parts of it work: in this way changes in behaviour and environment lead to measurable physical changes. A study conducted in London found that the hippocampus, a structure in the brain related to working memory, is bigger than normal in the brains of taxi drivers, who have to memorise thousands of streets - 'the Knowledge' - to win a licence.
Brains living vicariously in front of a screen watching TV, playing computer games, cutting and pasting Wikipedia for homework and texting gobbledegook will be exercised in a fundamentally different way from before. In cyberspace, kids who are blitzed with information from anywhere and everywhere may never acquire the capacity to see things in context; they may never get beyond the stage of taking the world at face value, where everything is only what it is, atomised and senseless. They will be rooted in the here and now, dominated by short-term excitements and live a life that is lacking in narrative and structure.
In Japan there is already a name for those who have chosen this path. The hikikomori are mostly young men who have turned their back on society to gaze at a computer screen.
