Brain twister
The brain is changing rapidly in response to a life lived increasingly in a virtual world. So who are we becoming? The government needs to act to find out, says Susan Greenfield
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.
There are signs of similar change closer to home: 80% of British children between the ages of five and 16 have a TV in their bedrooms; 89% of 12-year-olds have their own mobiles; young people spend more than six hours a day living a two-dimensional life in front of screens, and so on.
Look around. There are already clear links between the sedentary life allowed by the new technology and the rise in obesity. There has been a marked decline in the verbal communication skills of children and young people, while, at school, pupils are becoming increasingly self-obsessed and easily bored and consequently harder to teach. Could this be linked to immersion in the alternative world of the computer along with other behavioural problems, including gambling, drinking and violence among the young?
The constant thrills available online, whether ultraviolent games or hardcore pornography, mean that our pleasure circuits, which depend on dopamine, are being stimulated more than ever. An excess of dopamine can suppress the activity of the prefrontal cortex, which seems to be related to more complex activities such as balancing risk, imagining the future and considering the consequences of our actions.
The overthrilled next generation may well have even shorter attention spans and be less risk-averse than other generations, perhaps even reckless.
For the first time in human history individuality could be erased in favour of a passive state, one that lives on reflex reactions to a flood of incoming sensations: a ‘yuck and ahhh and wow’ mentality characterised by a premium on fleeting and evanescent experience as the landscape of the brain shifts into one where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether.
Society and self
Ministers and civil servants already know that just as many kinds of self make a society possible, so society makes the self possible. And, of course, different societies create different kinds of self. Can we – should government, public workers and policymakers – engineer our future so as to encourage a particular sense of self in future generations? In my new book, ‘iD: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’, I explore the effects of technology with a tripartite model of human identity – ‘Someone’, ‘Nobody’ and ‘Anyone’. The Someone option assumes that human nature is inviolate and we must stay as we are, individuals struggling to be someone, like Einstein, for example.
Nobody, by contrast, is a passive recipient of the senses: the product of present and future information technologies capable of altering our minds and bodies. Here, think video game addicts, receptive to new stimuli. The Anyone scenario is a collective identity, neither egoistic like Someone nor hedonistic like Nobody. Characterised by action with a more rigid frame of mind and collective identity, adherents of al-Qaeda come to mind.
What, then, will future generations be like? I fear that the child habituated to a strong sensationalist present will become addicted to thrill-bombardment and that, instead of becoming Someone, will remain a Nobody – a collection of ‘inputs’. Or that child may become Anyone – absorbed into totalitarian religion or ideology because the brain and its beliefs, porous to any suggestion, have never built up discriminatory defences. Taken alone, none of the scenarios of Someone, Nobody or Anyone is likely to prove satisfactory. I suggest that there is a fourth, the ‘Eureka’ scenario, where the experience of creativity enables you to feel both fulfilled and to have a sense of individual identity.
But even then, and given that we neuroscientists are still grappling with the mysteries of creativity, let alone what we mean by consciousness, some might object that the Eureka scenario could make for a dysfunctional society of egocentric, eccentric individuals.
Perhaps one answer would be to promote a mixed portfolio in which future generations flip from ‘let yourself go’ (Nobody), to selfless, collective working (Anyone), to an occasional thrill of personalised achievement (Someone), based not on superiority of status or possessions but on that warm inner-glow that comes with insight and creativity (Eureka). Now that might even be fun.
The government needs to harness the power of creativity.
With careful thought and planning, the changes that I fear the most could be moderated and channelled in positive directions, so that the computer remains on tap and not on top to make life easier and more fun but without providing such easy and glib answers that we lose our sense of being.
The most important step is to launch coordinated, government-backed studies into the impact on the brain of new technologies, so we do not sleepwalk to disaster.
What we urgently need is to find the facts behind the anecdotes that are already talking points: isn’t it striking how there has been a threefold increase in Ritalin prescriptions over the past ten years for attention deficit disorder at the same time that kids are spending all this extra time in front of screens? We need to find out if it is a coincidence or not. All these parents are saying, “I’m worried that my little Johnnie spends far too long in front of the screen”, so we should also be finding out how long it really is and what changes that is causing. Would continued interaction with a fast-paced, sensory-laden, multimedia environment predispose a brain to shorter attention spans?
At the moment there are only little pockets of academic research where a few experts might be investigating one aspect of human performance in a handful of kids who are doing one particular thing, whether killing avatars or viewing sexual gymnastics. In order for that to be extensive enough to be informative, you need government muscle behind it and money.
The big question
The government has to address a slew of related issues. Is it best never to be sad? Should the prim introduction to sex education in schools take on board the easy access to online pornography and its degraded form of femininity? Given the plasticity of the human brain, how can the computer change it for the better? Will easy access to endless information corrode our capacity for creative thought?
Only once we have appreciated how our malleable brains are interacting with technology will public services be able to plan the kind of education, as well as the goods and services, which we shall need in coming years. Only then will ministers understand their electorate, from the way they think to the things that they need. In short, the government should take the lead to make sure that the mid 21st century is the best time ever to be alive. Because virtual worlds are becoming all pervasive, perhaps ministers should set up a Royal Commission to answer The Big Question. Who are we becoming?
Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE is Director of the Royal Institution and Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford, where she heads a multidisciplinary group studying neurodegenerative disorders. Her latest book is iD: The Quest for
Identity in the 21st Century (Spectre)
Further reading
www.futuremind.ox.ac.uk/people/susan-greenfield.html
