Memory and evolution

I’ve been reading a lot about memory this past week, and one of the things that strikes me is that we don’t yet have a good enough model for equating the biochemistry of the brain with the experiential phenomenon of memory.

When I say I remember my 10th birthday or I remember what happened at the party last night, you know what I mean. But there’s an amazing array of processes that go into that - in terms of imagery, emotional connection and recall of facts and impressions.

However, although you can remember an event that took a long time to transpire, the act of rememberance happens in a very short space of time.

Obviously, you’re not recalling a sequential series of instants, but an overall sense of the recalled event. But the ways we have to explain that are derived from various different fields: literary criticism (metaphor seems to be the most useful framework we have to understand this), psychology, biochemistry, sociology - and so on.

And each perspective gives us a different view of what is going on… but none of them really address the brain itself and the complexities that it really presents.

One thing that is clear is that the brain changes in a concrete and very real way as a result of experiences. The information that makes its way into the brain rewires pathways, causes physical impressions, creates and reinforces connections… and this is entirely mediated through our senses.

As we change the way in which we take in visual, auditory and other information - that is, if the mode of mediation shifts - so too do the resulting physical processes that occur in our brains change.

Culturally, as our technologies change - and those extensions of our senses provide new ways of processing and importing information - so too do the meanings that we create change, thereby altering and adapting ourselves to the media environment.

Even if not ‘evolutionary’, it has to be said that the process of memory is an adaptive one. There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’m still processing…

Humanity lobotomy

Yes, this is definitely related.

I get accused from time to time of being a Technological Determinist. It’s sort of true: I believe that technology affects history. But I don’t believe that we are powerless in the face of our technologies. The whole point of evolution is that it is a creative response to an environmental change.

Computers don’t make us send emails, they allow us to. The fact that we send and receive so many of the damn things is not an inevitable consequence of digital technology, but the fact that we approach it uncritically and strategy-less.

So I guess the central purpose of the book (and this blog) is to underline the notion that it’s impossible to have a useful creative response to change unless you actually understand what’s going on. Ignorance killed the dinosaurs.

In the interests of adaptation to media shift and active resistance to unwanted technological change, please watch this video.

150 Friends

Bobo vendors in Burkina Faso (via Wikimedia)

I happened to bump into a friend of mine today - Nick Booth of Podnosh. Smart man. Social media expert about town.

We were talking about this book, and he happened to mention that he’d been reading a fair bit about evolutionary psychology over the past year or so. As you do.

It turns out that there’s a fairly well-supported theory that human beings hit a psychological ceiling when it comes to building relationships. You can handle about 150 people, then things get too complicated. Early communities would hit that ceiling, and then splinter off into other villages and tribes.

It’s not that one more relationship provides the straw that breaks the camel’s back - it’s that each additional relationship multiplies the complexity of the network. One more node on the network adds thousands more possible interconnections, and our brains just don’t handle it. Or at least, they couldn’t.

There is a direct, linear causal (non-evolutionary) theory that says the same must therefore apply to our online social networks. Make 151 friends on Facebook or MySpace, and you’ll experience psychological stress and have to take steps in order to cope.

But that seems not to be the case - and although it has a good deal to do with the fact that these online social networks do not consist exclusively of people that you have to manage on an up-close and personal, day-to-day basis that sharing a geographically defined space would necessitate, it also has to do with the fact that we have created tools for doing social “heavy lifting”.

Like the 150 friend limit of old, there was also a weight limit beyond which human beings simply could not lift. Picking up a rock much bigger than your average dog was not something we were evolutionarily equipped to handle. But with levers and pullies, we adapted. Now it seems there are very few things that humans can’t get from the bottom of a hill to the top.

Likewise with relationships. As we create tools in response to our limitations, the need to solve problems raised by the environments we find ourselves in and the technological opportunities at our disposal - the ceiling on all sorts of our abilities is raised. And, arguably, the quality of our engagement is impaired.

Just as the need not to expend energy to lift heavy objects means that we’re not automatically inclined to expend the sort of energy that make us fit and healthy physical specimens, it’s fairly convincing that the relationships we manage en masse are a bit on the weak and flabby side too.

Evolution is adaptation, not necessarily improvement.

I guess the workaround here would be to manage your hundreds of MySpace ‘friends’ using your digital levers and pullies - and do the social relationship equivalent of going to the gym in order to engage with your personal ‘village’.

House of Cards

Image by Lykle de Vries

So, I’m writing a book about the ways in which digitalisation changes not only what we do and how we operate, but who we are as human beings.

Following from Media Ecology and taking no small degree of inspiration from the work of Marshall McLuhan, NOW WE ARE DIFFERENT (working title) seeks to explore all of the aspects of lived human experience, from our biochemical makeup through to our cultural endeavours, and submit the following provocation: that digital media environments have facilitated a genuine evolutionary shift in human beings.

This blog is where I’ll be keeping notes, developing ideas, bookmarking interesting and relevant items and looking for encouragement, advice, feedback and support.

It seems fitting that Radiohead should provide the way into this exploration. Their new video, House of Cards is made without cameras. Instead, it uses 3D data modelling based on Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. The data has been released for public creation of new data visualisations. And there’s a YouTube group to discuss and share results.

Here’s the video:

And here’s the Making Of:

More information at Google Code:
http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/