How the Web Became Our ‘External Brain,’ and What It Means for Our Kids

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Recently, my two-year-old nephew Benjamin came across a copy of Vanity Fair abandoned on the floor. His eyes scanned the glossy cover, which shone less fiercely than the iPad he is used to but had a faint luster of its own. I watched his pudgy thumb and index finger pinch together and spread apart on Bradley Cooper’s smiling mug. At last, Benjamin looked over at me, flummoxed and frustrated, as though to say, “This thing’s broken.”

Search YouTube for “baby” and “iPad” and you’ll find clips featuring one-year-olds attempting to manipulate magazine pages and television screens as though they were touch-sensitive displays. These children are one step away from assuming that such technology is a natural, spontaneous part of the material world. They’ll grow up thinking about the internet with the same nonchalance that I hold toward my toaster and teakettle. I can resist all I like, but for Benjamin’s generation resistance is moot. The revolution is already complete.

Technology Is Evolving Just Like Our DNA Does

With its theory of evolution, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species may have outlined, back in 1859, an idea that explains our children’s relationship with iPhones and Facebook. We are now witness to a new kind of evolution, one played out by our technologies.

Excerpted from The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection The “meme,” a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, is an extension of Darwin’s Big Idea past the boundaries of genetics. A meme, put simply, is a cultural product that is copied. We humans are enamored of imitation and so become the ultimate “meme machines.” Memes—pieces of culture—copy themselves through history and enjoy a kind of evolution of their own, and they do so riding on the backs of successful genes: ours.

According to the memeticist Susan Blackmore, just as Darwinism submits that genes good at replicating will naturally become the most prevalent, technologies with a knack for replication rise to dominance. These “temes,” as she’s called these new replicators, could be copied, varied, and selected as digital information—thus establishing a new evolutionary process (and one far speedier than our genetic model). Blackmore’s work offers a fascinating explanation for why each generation seems less capable of managing solitude, and less likely to opt for technological disengagement.

YOUNG PEOPLE NOW COUNT ON THE INTERNET AS ‘THEIR EXTERNAL BRAIN’ AND HAVE BECOME SKILLFUL DECISION MAKERS—EVEN WHILE THEY ALSO ‘THIRST FOR INSTANT GRATIFICATION AND OFTEN MAKE QUICK, SHALLOW CHOICES.’

She suggests that temes are a different kind of replicator from the basic memes of everyday material culture. “Most memes . . . we forget how often we get them wrong,” Blackmore says. (Oral traditions of storytelling, for example, were characterized by constant twists in the tale.) “But with digital machines the fidelity is almost 100 percent. As it is, indeed, with our genes.” This is a startling thought: By delivering to the world technologies capable of replicating information with the same accuracy as DNA, we are playing a grand game indeed.

Old Ways of Thinking Are on the Verge of Extinction

The brains our children are born with are not substantively different from the brains our ancestors had 40,000 years ago. For all the wild variety of our cultures, personalities, and thought patterns, we’re all still operating with roughly the same three-pound lump of gray matter. But almost from day one, the allotment of neurons in those brains (and therefore the way they function) is different today from the way it was even one generation ago. Every second of your lived experience represents new connections among the roughly 86 billion neurons packed inside your brain. Children, then, can become literally incapable of thinking and feeling the way their grandparents did. A slower, less harried way of thinking may be on the verge of extinction.

In your brain, your billions of neurons are tied to each other by trillions of synapses, a portion of which are firing right now, forging (by still mysterious means) 

• your memory of this sentence, 
• your critique of this very notion, and 
• your emotions as you reflect on this information. 

Our brains are so plastic that they will reengineer themselves to function optimally in whatever environment we give them. Repetition of stimuli produces a strengthening of responding neural circuits. Neglect of other stimuli will cause corresponding neural circuits to weaken. (Grannies who maintain their crossword puzzle regime knew that already.)

UCLA’s Gary Small is a pioneer of neuroplasticity research, and in 2008 he produced the first solid evidence showing that our brains are reorganized by our use of the internet. He placed a set of “internet naïve” people in MRI machines and made recordings of their brain activity while they took a stab at going online. Small then had each of them practice browsing the internet for an hour a day for a week. On returning to the MRI machine, those subjects now toted brains that lit up significantly in the frontal lobe, where there had been minimal neural activity beforehand. Neural pathways quickly develop when we give our brains new tasks, and Small had shown that this held true—over the course of just a few hours, in fact— following internet use.

WE CAN TELL THAT SOMETHING HAS CHANGED IN OUR MINDS, BUT WE STILL FEEL HELPLESS AGAINST IT, AND WE EVEN FEEL ADDICTED TO THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE THAT CHANGE’S AGENTS.

“We know that technology is changing our lives. It’s also changing our brains,” he announced. On the one hand, neuroplasticity gives him great hope for the elderly. “It’s not just some linear trajectory with older brains getting weaker,” he told me. The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, material world.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of shallow thinking and less capable of deep thinking. After enough time in front of our screens, we learn to absorb more information less effectively, skip the bottom half of paragraphs, shift focus constantly; “the brighter the software, the dimmer the user,” he suggests at one point.

Kids These Days Can Think Quickly—But Not Deeply

The most startling example of our brain’s malleability, though, comes from new research by neural engineers at Boston University who now suggest that our children will be able to “incept” a person “to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.” The team was able to use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to modify in highly specific ways the brain activity in the visual cortex of their human subjects.

The possibilities of such injections of “unearned” learning are as marvelous as they are quagmires for bioethical debate. Your grandchild’s brain could be trained in a certain direction while watching ads through digital contact lenses without his or her awareness (or, for that matter, acquiescence). For now, it’s easier to tell that something has changed in our minds, but we still feel helpless against it, and we even feel addicted to the technologies that are that change’s agents. But will our children feel the static?

SOME ARGUE THAT THE YOUNG ARE DEVELOPING NEW SKILLS BETTER SUITED TO THEIR OWN REALITY THAN TO AN OUTMODED PAST.

In 2012, Elon University worked with the Pew Internet and American Life Project to release a report that compiled the opinions of 1,021 critics, experts, and stakeholders, asking for their thoughts on digital natives. Their boiled-down message was that young people now count on the internet as “their external brain” and have become skillful decision makers—even while they also “thirst for instant gratification and often make quick, shallow choices.”

Some of those experts were optimistic about the future brains of the young. Susan Price, CEO and chief Web strategist at San Antonio’s Firecat Studio, suggested that “those who bemoan the perceived decline in deep thinking . . . fail to appreciate the need to evolve our processes and behaviors to suit the new realities and opportunities.” Price promises that the young are developing new skills and standards better suited to their own reality than to the outmoded reality of, say, 1992. Meanwhile, the report’s coauthor, Janna Anderson, noted that while many respondents were enthusiastic about the future of such minds, there was a clear dissenting voice: “Some said they are already witnessing deficiencies in young people’s abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply. Some experts expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people become shallow consumers of information, endangering society.”

We may be on our way to becoming servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own.

But we’ll likely find there was no robotic villain behind the curtain. Our own capitalist drive pushes these technologies to evolve. We push the technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive possible outcome. Yet even as we do this, it doesn’t feel as though we have any control. It feels, instead, like a destined outcome—a fate.

Excerpted from The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris, in agreement with Current, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright (c) Michael Harris, 2014.

Editor: Samantha Oltman (@samoltman)

ORIGINAL: Wired

BY MICHAEL HARRIS 

08.06.14

Michael Harris

Michael Harris is a contributing editor at Western Living andVancouver magazine. His award-winning writing appears regularly in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Walrus. He is the author of The End of Absence and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Real King Kong may have been brought down by fruit

The extinction of Gigantopithecus has been blamed on switching to a fruit-filled diet (Image: Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library)

It was fruit killed the beast. Gigantopithecus, the largest known ape, may have been wiped out by a diet of fruit containing little nourishment.

Nearly 80 years ago, Dutch anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald discovered a giant human-like tooth in a drug store in Hong Kong, and named the animal it came from Gigantopithecus.

Since then, thousands more large teeth – and three jawbones – have come to light in southern Asia. They show that Gigantopithecus stood up to 3 metres tall, making it the largest known ape, and was probably related to orang-utans. But why it went extinct remains unclear.

Now Yingqi Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates in Beijing has analysed 17 newly discovered Gigantopithecus teeth. At less than 400,000 years old, they are among the youngest remains of the ape ever found, meaning they belonged to some of the last of the giant apes to walk the Earth.

Poor dental hygiene

Many of the teeth were eroded. This poor dental hygiene hints at a problem with their diet, says Zhang. "There was something wrong before Gigantopithecus's extinction, and I think it comes from the food."

The ape may have had to switch diet as the climate cooled and its preferred food – probably plants like bamboo – became rare. The teeth suggest it turned to less-nutritious fruit rich in enamel-eroding acids, says Zhang.

But fruit is good for most apes, says Kornelius Kupczik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "Chimpanzees eat a lot of fruits that are extremely bitter or acidic to the human palate," he says, yet their teeth don't rot much.

Journal reference: Quaternary International, DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2013.12.008


ORIGINAL: New Scientist

by Colin Barras 

14 January 2014

Welcome Your New Primate Overlords: Chimp Tech Is on the Rise

ORIGINAL: Geeks Are Sexy

While the human tech world rages and swoons over the new iPad (¿Gorilla Display perhaps?), our primate cousins are at the height of what Discovery News is calling the Great Chimp Tech Boom. Poking at ants with a stick hardly seems like a newly integrated, top-of-the-line technological feat. But for chimpanzees, this recent development in “cultural variation,” or behavior specific to a community rather than a species as a whole, is more important than you’d expect. According to renowned British anthropologist Jane Goodall, technology among chimpanzees is improving and being adopted more rapidly than previously expected.

Just a couple of chimpanzees fishing for ants with tools they built. No big deal. Image: Robert O’Malley

Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than any other living species — so closely, in fact, that in 2003 a team of biologists suggested moving chimps to the human branch of the family tree. It’s unsurprising, then, that chimpanzees also exhibit the highest rate of cultural variation of any non-human species. A team of evolutionary anthropologists and other animal behavior researchers, including Goodall, have identified at least 39 community-specific behaviors within different groups of chimps, which range from methods of swatting flies (some groups use leaves, while others employ the ‘index squash,’ or one-fingered smash-it-till-it’s-dead method) to variations on simple tools, like using stones to crack open nuts versus smashing them against the ground with a heavy piece of wood, for example.

Ant fishing (that’s the “poking at ants with a stick” thing) is an amazing example of cultural variation for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it requires a tool (that’s the stick), which is used to retrieve super-tasty ants and termites from their nests with ease. And even the stick has seen improvements; in 2009 a group of chimps were observed fraying the ends of their sticks to allow more surface area for catching ants and termites. But there’s another, more important reason ant fishing is a big deal: it’s the first novel adaptation outside of captivity that we’ve witnessed moving from one group into another. (The study’s authors call this “intercommunity cultural transmission.”) According to a new report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, ant fishing is really catching on, and it’s all thanks to a sharp-witted chimp named Trezia.

Trezia is a wild chimpanzee who lives in Gombe Stream National Park, home to Jane Goodall (the report’s co-author) and her beloved Kasekela chimpanzee community. When Trezia was transferred to the Kasekela group from the separate Mitumba community, her wit and ease made her a favorite among her new family. But the Kaseleka chimps didn’t fish for ants. But they learned how eventually, because Trezia didn’t stop fishing for ants just because she lived in a new group. For her, this was normal, everyday behavior; in 1982, ant fishing was declared a customary behavior within Trezia’s Mitumba home group. It appeared in 1994 in the Kaseleka group (after Trezia’s relocation), and as of 2010 is considered customary there as well.

Of course, chimps aren’t the only primates to surprise observers with their technological prowess. Young gorillas have recently been spotted dismantling snare traps left by poachers, a development that’s both incredible and something of a relief. An ingenious Japanese macaque named Imo figured out that washing the grit off of sweet potatoes made them better to eat, and in so doing taught an entire population of macaques to wash their food. And in a group of capuchin monkeys in Brazil, not only is cracking palm nuts with stones the preferred method of midday snack procurement, the monkeys are choosing the optimal stones for the job by testing the rocks for sturdiness and weight before wasting any time using them as hammers. What’s next? Our money is on agriculture and figure-flattering winter wear.