The Making of the Mind: The Neuroscience of Human Nature (35 page)

TWO MINDS OF THE FUTURE

What effects do television and the Internet have on the functional capacities of the human mind? Taking for granted the power and pervasiveness of these technological innovations, how are they shaping the twenty-first century mind?

Nicholas Carr detailed the downside in his book
The Shallows
: the superconnectivity of images, texts, and people on the Internet is itself a problem because it distracts too much. To the extent that the Internet becomes the primary medium through which we now gather information about the world, the ability to navigate rapidly through a series of hyperlinks may weaken the mind's capacity for reflection on a few ideas of relevance and significance. Carr confesses that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”
³¹
With link after link, the Internet invites us into a continuous and clearly endless search through headlines, abbreviated news reports, charts, posts to blogs, compelling images, video clips, podcasts, and so on. Just as the compelling nature of television draws our attention into its rapidly changing images, so, too, does browsing the Internet shape the mind so that it “wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts.”
³²

The ubiquity of television in daily life—not just at home but in public spaces such as airports, dentists’ offices, and restaurants—has given us a foretaste of how the twenty-first-century mind might be adapting to such technologies. Children ages one to three appear less focused in their play with toys and devote less time to them while a television is on in the background: “They begin to look like junior multitaskers, moving from toy to toy, forgetting what they were doing when they were interrupted by an interesting snippet of the show.”
³³

Internet surfing and personal computer games are so compelling that some have worried that excessive exposure to them could even contribute to the development of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For example, one study reported an association between Internet addiction in elementary school children in Korea and symptoms of ADHD.
³⁴
The exciting content of these media, relative to the mundane realities of life at home or in school, as well as the rapid sequence changes that repeatedly capture attention, could in theory spell trouble. The brain's networks of attention might develop
differently in such a technologically laden environment compared with a purely natural one. A longitudinal study in New Zealand assessed this possibility by obtaining estimates from parents of how long their children watched television on weekdays at the ages of five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, and fifteen years.
³⁵
The researchers then measured adolescent attention problems at the ages of thirteen and fifteen years based on self-report as well as reports from parents and teachers. The outcome showed that adolescents who watched two to three hours per day, and especially more than three hours per day, had more attention problems than those who watched less than two hours per day. The correlation was moderate in size, and the authors noted that children who already had attention problems often preferred to watch more television, indicating that the causal relation was actually bidirectional. In a similar study, efforts to measure attention problems and their link to exposure to a combination of television and video games found small to moderate, but statistically significant, correlations. For both boys and girls in middle childhood and in late adolescence, the total reported time engaged with screen media modestly predicted attention problems.
³⁶
Because the findings were correlational, it is not possible to definitively conclude that excessive exposure to screen media causes attention problems. Still, the authors noted that “most of the research evidence thus far supports the conclusion that exposure to television and video games increases the risk for subsequent attention problems.”
³⁷

Arguably, the revolution in applied computer science and telecommunications is formidable enough to distract the twenty-first-century mind. While this is of concern in children and adolescents still undergoing brain maturation, such findings in themselves may distract us from a larger truth. Could it be that we are lamenting the distraction of the Internet Age as Plato lamented the forgetfulness inflicted by the invention of writing? As became transparent centuries later, the literate mind brought us much more than forgetfulness. With its reliance on external memory storage, literacy also brought us a mode of logical-analytical thought that made possible the advent of modern science and the miracles of a technological world. Thus, distraction may be to the postliterate mind of the computer age what forgetfulness was to the literate mind of writing and external symbol storage. Forgetfulness aside, we would not have the scientific and technological culture of the twenty-first century
had it not been for the widespread adoption of literacy. In an analogous way, the Internet, with its capacity for nearly instantaneous connection with virtually all knowledge and all people, could have a far more deep-seated effect on civilization than mere distraction.

E-mail, text messaging, and social networks allow the creation of a virtual social world in which one can actively participate. Because it is virtual, geographical distances no longer much matter. Language rather than physical proximity becomes the primary barrier to human connectivity. As long as two people share a common language, the virtual social world can encompass people from many countries and many cultures. Paradoxically, the borderless virtual space of the Internet seems to help shrink the world at the same time that it links together hundreds of millions of human beings. As the world's population now exceeds seven billion, the Internet can potentially create a global neighborhood through a common medium. Its audio and visual images, if not the languages, are shared across national and political borders. Assuming sufficient penetration of Internet access in a society, high and low income strata have access to the same free content, which opens doors to shared experiences, ideas, and conversations.

In addition to connections with people, the Internet provides connections with knowledge. As external memory for symbol storage, the Internet is massive and vastly superior in both capacity and access to nondigital libraries. Think of it as a library on steroids. The Internet provides access to essentially every known source of knowledge since the beginning of human history. Through the digitization of books, photographs, and other informational media, the Internet can integrate the written word with visual and auditory images far beyond the limits of printed books. The use of hypermedia also permits the retrieval of related knowledge in ways that books cannot match. The superconnectivity of the Internet may thus lay the groundwork for remarkable intellectual innovations. To see the Internet's potential, we must keep in mind that our existing scientific and theoretic culture draws chiefly on the power of external memory storage. The literate mind already overcame the limitations of retrieval from human long-term memory and the transient storage of working memory. Now, today's mind is poised to exploit an essentially unlimited external memory.

The expansion of external symbol storage in human history, from the famed library of ancient Alexandria to the Library of Congress or the British Library of the twentieth century, has been impressive. But the digital world of the Internet is transformative and still underappreciated. The digital storage of all printed materials—both texts and images—extends external memory storage to the limit of infinity while providing a manageable way of gaining access to any and all relevant information. The Internet is a “transbook…it is the book which can contain all books.”
³⁸

The connections among people and stored knowledge afforded by the Internet can be the catalyst for a collective form of intelligence. The scientific and theoretic culture made possible by literacy is just the beginning. By pooling and cross-germinating our ideas, a connected contemporary mind can culturally evolve from the brain of our Paleolithic ancestors. Hidden within the cerebral cortex of the human brain lies a new organ of civilization, one that could be expressed by networking ideas and people massively and cross-culturally. To see this point, keep in mind that cultural innovations of the past have always arisen out of human connectivity. Innovation depends on the collision of ideas fostered by human interactions.
³⁹

For example, the rate of cultural change in human populations has always depended on the degree to which individuals engage in trade in the economic sphere. Being part of a trade route in the ancient world meant everything. Istanbul, for example, prospered because it was at the center of Asia to the east and Europe to the west. Cultural innovations and the changes in our functional mental capacities that came with them have always depended on human interactions. Cities, both in the ancient and in the modern world, have been and continue to be the centers of technological innovation. It is not a surprise that Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area was the birthplace of the revolution in personal computing and telecommunications rather than, say, Death Valley. The dense population of the Bay area, with its universities, research companies, and sources of venture capital in close proximity, facilitated technological innovation. Dense populations allow human minds to meet and cross-fertilize much more readily than sparse populations.

The collective intelligence that drives innovations in technology requires collaborative efforts. The capability of the Internet to link ideas and people
eliminates the problem of geography. As long as the texts and images are mutually understood, collaboration is now possible regardless of where people live. If dense cities and trade routes were the incubators of innovation in the past, the Internet opens a new door. Perhaps face-to-face contact—the key advantage of being in the right city at the right time—will no longer matter. In short, the Internet provides a new kind of trade route of ideas and people through a virtual landscape. Collaborative innovation on a worldwide scale is thus only now possible for the first time in human history.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams developed this theme in the economic realm in their book
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
. One illustration of successful global collaboration enabled by the Internet is the case of a gold-mining company that released all its proprietary geological data—going back five decades—and challenged the global community to find new deposits. The “Goldcorp Challenge” offered prize money to entice submissions from geologists, graduate students, and other participants from diverse scientific backgrounds who identified more than fifty new target areas unexplored by the company in the past—80 percent of these struck gold, and since the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found.”
⁴⁰

In the scientific realm, Michael Neilsen makes the case in
Reinventing Discovery
that “to historians looking back a hundred years from now, there will be two eras of science: pre-network science, and networked science.”
⁴¹
The Internet could dramatically increase the rate of progress in science and in applying new discoveries to solving global problems. To illustrate, a multiplayer online game was recently devised to solve problems in molecular biology.
⁴²
The three-dimensional structures of proteins are specified by the sequence of their amino acids, but the number of possible ways in which they can be structured exceeds our computational power. Microbiologists have had little success in predicting protein structure with software because the solution space is too large for all but the smallest of proteins. Collective human intelligence was brought to bear on the problem by creating an online video game called Foldit. A puzzle protein is posted online for a fixed interval of time and players from around the world interactively reshape the protein with a goal of minimizing its energy profile. Players may compete as a soloist or work
in groups. Competition is encouraged by posting each soloist or group score from best to worst. The top-ranked Foldit players excelled in finding correct solutions, and players working in collaboration discovered new search strategies not examined by existing software. Foldit demonstrates the potential of tapping collaborative problem solving on a massive scale through the Internet.

The Internet capitalizes on all parts of the modern ensemble of mind. Creative problem solving enabled by the executive functions of working memory teams up with the symbolic thought of written language. Our advanced social intelligence may find its fullest expression through the massive, global connectivity of the Internet. Mental time travel can now draw not only upon the episodic memory storage of the brain, but also upon a vast external store of history. The immediate accessibility of all recorded knowledge as text and images—a transbook that contains all books—provides an unprecedented resource for the imagination. Our human capacity to envision the future has never had a richer source of possibilities. The superconnectivity of the Internet may thus be a technological invention capable of nurturing social networks, opening knowledge access to all, and encouraging collaborative problem solving on a global scale. If the Internet's promise is actualized, then the worry about technology-induced distraction will perhaps subside. A distracted mind may be the price we pay for a connected mind, much as forgetting was the price paid for the advances writing brought us. If speaking was crawling, and writing was walking, then we are now running with the Internet. Where, then, is our destination?

CHAPTER 1. ORIGINS

1
. Randall White,
Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 97.

2
. Melanie Proust et al. “Genotypes of Predomestic Horses Match Phenotypes Painted in Paleolithic Works of Cave Art,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108, no. 46 (2011): 18626.

3
. Margaret W. Conkey, “A History of the Interpretation of European ‘Paleolithic Art’: Magic, Mythogram, and Metaphors for Modernity.” In
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution
, eds. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 288–95.

4
. Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar,
The Dawn of Human Culture
(New York: Nevraumont Publishing Company, 2002), p. 261.

5
. Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,”
Journal of Human Evolution
39 (2000): 456.

6
. Stephen J. Gould,
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 914.

7
. Ibid., pp. 765–69.

8
. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending,
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 77.

9
. Steve Olson,
Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and our Common Origins
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), p. 16.

10
. Ibid., p. 17.

11
. Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders. “The Chimpanzee and Us,”
Nature
437 (September 1, 2005): 50.

12
. Carina Dennis, “Primate Evolution: Branching Out,”
Nature
437 (September 1, 2005): 17–19.

13
. C. Owen Lovejoy, “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of
Ardipithecus ramidus
,”
Science
326 (October 2, 2009): 74e1, doi:10.1126/science.1175834.

14
. Peter H. Raven and George B. Johnson,
Biology
, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1999), p. 458.

15
. Olson,
Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and our Common Origins
, p. 3.

16
. Roger Lewin, “Mitochondrial Eve: The Biochemical Route to Human Origins,”
Mosaic
22, no. 3 (1991): 48–49.

17
. Raven and Johnson,
Biology
, p. 459.

18
. Richard Thompson,
The Brain: A Neuroscience Primer
, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2000), p. 3.

19
. Jackson Beatty,
The Human Brain: Essentials of Behavioral Neuroscience
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications), p. 52.

20
. Sean B. Carroll, “Genetics and the Making of
Homo sapiens
,”
Nature
422 (2003): 849.

21
. Richard G. Klein,
The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins
, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 580.

22
. Ralph Holloway, “Evolution of the Human Brain.” In
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution
, eds. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 80.

23
. Robert Sean Hill and Christopher W. Walsh, “Molecular Insight into Human Brain Evolution,”
Nature
437 (September 1, 2005): 64.

24
. Carroll, “Genetics and the Making of
Homo sapiens
,” p. 851.

25
. Chris P. Ponting and Gerton Lunter, “Human Brain Gene Wins Genome Race,”
Nature
443 (September 2006): 149.

26
. Thompson,
The Brain
, p. 8.

27
. Ibid, p. 14.

28
. Ibid, p. 15.

29
. Ibid, p. 17.

30
. Beatty,
The Human Brain
, pp. 59–60.

31
. Paul D. MacLean, “On the Evolution of the Three Mentalities of the Brain.” In
Origins of Human Aggression: Dynamics and Etiology
(New York: Human Sciences Press, 1987), pp. 29–38.

32
. Ibid., p. 39.

33
. Joseph E. LeDoux, “Emotion Circuits in the Brain,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience
23 (2000): 157.

34
. Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier, 1905), p. 170.

35
. Ibid., pp. 170–71.

CHAPTER 2. EXECUTIVE WORKING MEMORY

1
. P. S. Goldman-Rakic, “Cellular Basis of Working Memory,”
Neuron
14 (1995): 483.

2
. Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, “A Stone-Age Meeting of Minds,”
American Scientist
96 (January–February 2008): 46.

3
. Steven Mithen,
The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 155.

4
. Wynn and Coolidge, “A Stone-Age Meeting of Minds,” p. 49.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Edward E. Smith and John Jonides, “Working Memory: A View from Neuroimaging,”
Cognitive Psychology
33 (1997): 11.

7
. Morris Moscovitch, Gordon Winocur, and Marlene Behrmann, “What Is Special about Face Recognition? Nineteen Experiments on a Person with Visual Object Agnosia and Dyslexia but Normal Face Recognition,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
9 (1997): 587–89.

8
. Jennifer Steeves et al., “Abnormal Face Identity Coding in the Middle Fusiform Gyrus of Two Brain-Damaged Prosopagnosic Patients,”
Neuropsychologia
47 (2009): 2584.

9
. David C. Geary,
The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005), pp. 128–29.

10
. Mithen,
The Prehistory of the Mind
, pp. 163–64.

11
. Wynn and Coolidge, “A Stone-Age Meeting of Minds,” pp. 45–46.

12
. Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun,
Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 426.

13
. Ibid., p. 425.

14
. K. Semendeferi et al., “Humans and Great Apes Share a Large Frontal Cortex,”
Nature Neuroscience
5 (March 2002): 273.

15
. Ibid., p. 274.

16
. Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
24 (2001): 87.

17
. Joël Fagot and Carlo De Lillo, “A Comparative Study of Working Memory: Immediate Serial Recall in Baboons (
Papio papio
) and Humans,”
Neuropsychologia
49 (2011): 3872.

18
. Goldman-Rakic, “Cellular Basis of Working Memory,” p. 483.

19
. Semendeferi et al., “Humans and Great Apes,” p. 272.

20
. Alan Baddeley, Susan Gathercole, and Costanza Papagno, “The Phonological Loop as a Language Learning Device,”
Psychological Review
105 (1998): 158.

21
. Susan E. Gathercole and Alan D. Baddeley,
Working Memory and Language
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), p. 41.

22
. Alan Baddeley et al., “The Phonological Loop,” p. 159.

23
. Ibid., pp. 161–62.

24
. Smith and Jonides, “Working Memory,” p. 12.

25
. Semendeferi et al., “Humans and Great Apes,” p. 275.

26
. Peter R. Juttenlocher and Arun S. Dabholkar, “Regional Differences in Synaptogenesis in Human Cerebral Cortex,”
Journal of Comparative Neurology
387 (1997): 167.

27
. Elizabeth R. Sowell, Paul M. Thompson, Colin J. Holmes, Terry L. Jernigan, and Arthur W. Toga, “In Vivo Evidence for Post-Adolescent Brain Maturation in Frontal and Striatal Regions,”
Nature Neuroscience
2 (1999): 859–60.

28
. Ibid., p. 860.

29
. Semendeferi et al., “Humans and Great Apes,” p. 272.

30
. Michael I. Posner and Mary K. Rothbart,
Educating the Human Brain
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), p. 60.

31
. Ibid., pp. 82–86.

32
. Ibid.

33
. Akira Miyake and Naomi P. Friedman, “The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
21 (2012): 8.

34
. Ibid., p. 11.

35
. Posner and Rothbart,
Educating the Human Brain
, p. 91.

36
. Ibid., p. 92.

37
. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda and Phillip K. Peake, “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool Delay of Gratification,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
54 (1988): 688–91.

38
. Randall W. Engle et al., “Working Memory, Short-Term Memory, and General Fluid Intelligence: A Latent Variable Approach,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
12 (1999): 324.

39
. John Duncan et al., “A Neural Basis for General Intelligence,”
Science
289 (July 2000): 459.

40
. Posner and Rothbart,
Educating the Human Brain
, p. 111.

41
. Simon M. Reader and Kevin N. Laland, “Social Intelligence, Innovation, and Enhanced Brain Size in Primates,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
99 (April 2002): 4437–38.

CHAPTER 3. SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

1
. Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar,
The Dawn of Human Culture
(New York: Nevraumont Publishing Company, 2002), p. 261.

2
. Randall White, “On the Evolution of Human Socio-Cultural Patterns.” In
Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution
, eds. Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 246–51.

3
. Xiaiohong Wu et al., “Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China,”
Science
336 (June 2012): 1696.

4
. Ibid., p. 1699.

5
. W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, “You Are What You Spend,”
New York Times
, Sunday Opinion, February 10, 2008, final edition, p. 14.

6
. Michael Tomasello,
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 2.

7
. Ibid., p. 38.

8
. Ibid., p. 37.

9
. Darrin R. Lehman, Chi-yie Chiu, and Mark Schaller, “Psychology and Culture,”
Annual Review of Psychology
55 (2004): 697–700.

10
. Ibid., p. 698.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Seth J. Schwartz, Jennifer B. Unger, Byron L. Zamboanga, and José Szapocznik, “Rethinking the Concept of Acculturation: Implications for Theory and Research,”
American Psychologist
65 (2010): 242–43.