Journal

In “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” author Nicholas Carr takes us on a brief tour of the history of technology and tool use, particularly writing, and discusses its effect on the brain. “We create our tools and then they create us,” is an essential point made throughout the book. I was braced for an alarmist, Luddite exposition which we are all tired off – “people are distracted by their cell phones and this does not auger well for everything from driving to dinner conversation.” We know this. What I discovered though was a rather thorough investigation into the precise effects which our deeply internet based world is having upon our brains. In sum: it’s troubling. In everything from memory scores to problem solving, from cognitive load to working memory, from attention spans to the quality of academic research papers, the internet is truly rewiring our brain circuitry and not for the better.  It’s a thought provoking book, a fast read which may be a catalyst of change for the highly wired individual like myself.

The most poignant passage in the book was a quote from the playwright Richard Foreman. “I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. But now I see within us all the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’ As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance we risk turning into pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Any time one considers the present in the light of the past one risks the shouts of nostalgia! as though the mere mention of how things once were is akin to a hypocritical jaunt down a younger years lane. But consider your own situation. Are your relationships becoming deeper and more meaningful as the years go by (as is natural), or are they becoming ever more superficial, and your interactions with others more disconnected? Do you power down your cell phone for a movie but leave it on during dinner with real people? Are you ever more easily distracted? Can you sit still in a room by yourself with no external distractions for more than a few minutes or do you start feeling anxious? As you mature, are you building an ever deeper inner life or do you feel alienated from yourself? In short, are you becoming a cathedral or a pancake?

I have discovered through personal experience that one very effective way to combat greed is to view possessions, particularly money, as nothing more than tools. Viewing possessions in this way, as having purpose and not as ends in themselves, one remains detached yet necessarily responsible. Money is a tool.

The same goes with care of the body. In our culture today we are witnessing the cult of the body, the hyperbolic emphasis on self-care, the worship of the flesh and its pleasures, which invariably ends in profound unhappiness because we are quite literally not wired to find joy in making ourselves gods. How is this to be balanced with the responsibility we have to care for ourselves? The most effective way to combat vanity is to view one’s body as being for others. I keep myself physically fit so I can be of use to my elderly neighbors. When they need assistance with lawn care I have an able body to put into action. If I didn’t care for myself I wouldn’t be able to help them. If I stayed fit purely for vanities sake I wouldn’t even notice their need.

We are entering into a remarkable period which has science at profound variance with marketing and consumerism. In the bookstore today I saw advertising signs saying It Really Is All About You! Yet the magazine stand had current issues of Scientific American Mind magazine and Psychology Today which had articles about how the way out of depression is to give yourself away in relationships and how altruism is healthy for the brain.

Altruism can have a profound effect on the social networks in which you move. Of course so can negative contagions such as drug use or crime. However social theorists can now show that human networks over time expel and marginalize individuals bringing such contagion to the network in an attempt to limit the harm it does to the whole. Altruistic individuals, on the other hand, tend to increase and deepen their relationships. The network, recognizing value in these persons, move them deeper into the middle where they exert even greater influence on the whole. This redounds in enormous benefits for the person, increasing their health, happiness and longevity.

Is there anyone more painful to be around than the self-absorbed? Is there anyone nicer to be around than the one who never speaks of themselves but engages with you on a subject other than them? This is self-evident, and clearly speaks to how the human person is wired, to our deep-seated need to commune with one another. One feels abused when in the presence of the narcissist, as though you are there simply to fulfill their incessant need to obsess about themselves with a captive audience present.

Actions which have as their end nothing but self-fulfillment never quite seem to satisfy as much as those which have the community or another person as the subject of interest. Granted, self-development is critical; the difference is in viewing self-development as a means to better serving others and contribute to the human experience overall rather than seeking to feed our ravenous ego in a spiral of conceit.

Comedy relief: Two girls are talking. One is blabbering endlessly about herself, until she seems to realize her error:

“But enough about me. What about you? What do you think of me?”

Mindfulness Meditation is getting a lot of press these days, in large part because neuroscientists can now show how the brain changes in positive ways in those who meditate. This style of meditation consists in keeping one’s focus on something (an object, a word), returning to the object gently each time one’s mind drifts to other thoughts. It’s really quite simple. The challenge is in not judging it while doing it, but simply letting go of thoughts as they arise, no matter what they are (”am I doing this right? I’m so distracted” and so on). Such a discipline has measurable positive results. Of course it is much more natural to turn one’s mind to a person, rather than an object (a candle) or a state (nothingness), and this practice does not work if one simply navel-gazes. The one who practices this art knows the liberating moment when self-forgetfulness is achieved. It feels very much like a gift, meaning it is something received rather than achieved.

The point of all this? The same point as is being made in so many other areas: neuroscience, social networks, religion, psychology…

Fulfilling and healthy human life makes itself about others.

During a football game the other day I was stunned when I saw one of the commercials. An attractive female officer pulled over an attractive woman driving a red convertible. The officer identified the driver as a “GoDaddy Girl.”  (GoDaddy is a website hosting service). She told her she wanted to be a GoDaddy Girl too, and began stripping for her in what was quickly becoming a lesbian encounter. At this point a banner came across the screen which said “for the unrated version go to the website.” The website (again, keep in mind this is a worldwide provider of website services) shows the officer hop up on the hood of the car, strip down to a leather thong and proceed to grind her crotch toward the drivers face. At this point, men, you are supposed to grab your own crotch and play along.

The day before that football game I saw an advertisement, again on network television, for a new upcoming “family show.” The scene had a young boy entering a kitchen reading a book. The boy looked up at his mom and said, “Mommy, what part of my body is my throbbing manhood?”  A laugh track started.

This evening I went to a Wiki Answers website which talked about the expiration dates for various diary products. A graphic slid down the left side of the screen showing a movie clip of a woman nearly completely naked, her hand drifting down her stomach toward her groin in an approaching act of masturbation. A button below the image beckons the viewer to play along:

I didn’t click the image but I investigated elsewhere what Evony is. It is an online computer game. This is one of the screenshots for the game:

I went to a Border’s bookstore in Raleigh recently. There were two entire rows of books in the “Erotica” section. On the bottom shelf of one row was a large hardback coffee table book of pornography. On the cover was a nude man with his face buried in the crotch of a nude woman. There was a young boy in the aisle, eagerly taking in all the sights. How did he find his way there? In the middle of the aisle was a table with Disney books and toys on it.

And so we go. The depth of our depravity can only worsen because, among other reasons, the men in our society who would lead us out of this swamp are either too apathetic to care or are themselves addicted to pornography. As a society we welcome it, consume it, beg for more and spread it to our children. Even if you have no system of morality which includes basics such as self-respect, respect for the personhood of others, the dignity of the body and the sanctity of the marital union, you should still be intensely interested in the rapidly degrading state of things. Historians of civilizations tell us that the final death throes of any culture is the gleeful abandonment of any kind of sexual ethic and a mindless sprint toward an all-out personal and communal sexual deviancy. This deviancy is characterized by a profound objectivization of others for self-gratification.

It just doesn’t work, on either a personal level or a societal level. The human person’s brain atrophies the more self-absorbed it becomes, and there is no quicker path to self-absorption than pornography.

A Harvard social scientist and a political scientist have recently completed five years worth of research, compiling over 50 years worth of data originally collected for the purpose of studying cardiovascular risk factors. The data inadvertently contains a wealth of information on close friends, colleagues and family members across generations.

The remarkable finding is that our friends influence much more of our lives than ever imagined. For instance, if a person has an obese friend, their likelihood of becoming obese rises dramatically – by 171 percent, far more than any other risk factor, including genes. It doesn’t even matter how far away they live. Body weight isn’t the only contagion, however. Happiness spreads along one’s network, as does depression.

The human capacity for close friendships is remarkably consistent. People from cultures throughout the world report between four and seven close friends. The scientists wondered if technologies recent reach around the world, with internet sites such as Facebook, has changed our ability to have more close friends. They worked with anonymized Facebook data, studying such things as the number of pictures on a site which had a photograph of a friend. What they found was the number of close friends on the average Facebook site was 6.6.

I am extremely eager to read their new book discussing the results of this research. It is entitled Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Change Our Lives.

The latest findings in neuroscience offer unqualified support for this position.  Our brains are wired for community, they demand strong interpersonal relationships. Without them, areas of the brain wither and die. Whether we like it or not, we are intensely social animals, and cognitive health requires more interconnectedness, not less.