Excellent commentary. As an old academic, even I find similar problems within myself. When a graduate student, I spent long hours reading and doing long complex math problems. Today, the internet has produced a rather short attention-spanned old man. If you don’t grab my attention in the first few minutes, I move on. This is of course bad news for reading academic books and such. I have found that (personal observations) I often have to put down a book after a few minutes and close my eyes, perhaps even doze off, then pick it up again. Sometimes this process repeats for as long as an hour. Then magically (?) my attention spans kicks in and I’m good for hours of productive reading.
I hope you are wrong with the possibility of brain damage, rather than poor training of the mind wrt concentration, but I suspect you are not. Bad habits can be broken. Brain damage?
It's been shown that certain activities enhance our mental acuity, even though the reasons are not well understood. The major activities are playing a musical instrument, learning foreign languages, especially those that use a different script, and playing games like Chess, GO or Scrabble. Spatially oriented pattern matching games also help. For example, here's one I'm playing right now:
I found this game extremely frustrating when I first started, now I can make it all the way through and even get my name on the scoreboard in about 35th place...lol! If you find it too difficult start with this one, then try Majong Connect later.
In your previous work you identified the changing make-up of the population on earth because of dysgenics as a potential cause of less resilience and more disorders. You might also look at vaccines.
I wonder if ADHD might perhaps be caused by children's memory functions being under~ or undeveloped? In cultures based on oral traditions people needed to develop their memory capacity to an extent which today seems simply stunning. In the 'old' days before electronics in the form of pocket calculators made their way into class rooms, followed but the rest and now the deluge of smartphones, schoolchildren were made to learn by heart - i.e. memorise - literature, multiplication tables, mathematical rules, formulas in physics and chemistry, together with grammar rules and spelling. Nowadays, 'the computer' does it for everybody, no need to know how do even a simple addition. No need to remember anything because 'Alexa' will know the answer.
That's why I wonder if it's not so much the screen time but the easy way in which to access knowledge, without effort and without memorising it, might play a significant role in under developing memory function.
I work as a tutor. Most of my high school students don't know their multiplication tables. Memorization of any sort is considered extremely difficult and unnecessary.
The ancients divided education into three parts -- grammar (rote learning), logic (reasoning), and rhetoric (synthesizing grammar and logic to persuade). Somewhere along the line, we decided that grammar wasn't necessary and that we could jump straight to logic. Now we're seeing the fruits of that decision. Maybe our forefathers actually knew more than "doctors" of education!
I read somewhere that most of our actual learning happens in the first few years of school. This is the time when we learn how to learn, and if we haven't taken the basic concepts on board by middle school, we're just not going to do very well. Also, as I mentioned in another comment, how do you inspire curiosity in the student? What is it about us that some are curious about the world while others are not? Is it simply a measure of intelligence, or is some basic element missing in those early school years?
Think of how easy it is for children to learn a second language if they're exposed at an early age. They just soak it up like a sponge! In my day, French was compulsory from elementary school onward. Today, 50 years later, I can still read a French newspaper and watch French TV with about 60-70% comprehension, even though I rarely ever used the language and got failing grades in later school years. I also speak Spanish, but that came about via emmersion in Spanish culture along with a Spanish wife. Since those early years I've also studied Japanese, Punjabi and Russian, but progress was very slow and I don't claim fluency in any of them. Why is this? It's not for want of trying. There's something fundamentally different between the way children learn and the way adults do. This hasn't received nearly the amount of attention it deserves IMO.
For what it's worth, the human brain "matures" through a series of neuron die-offs. The second (?) largest one of these is around 19-20 years of age. If you recall your experience of those years, you may remember that at one point the world just cleared. It became straightforward, you became able to grasp the thing. That was actually the brain killing off all the neurons it wasn't using, and that were causing the cacophony in your head. xD The dieoff quited the brain down and enabled you to really focus on things. But the tradeoff is that now you lost the plasticity of the brain: it's now impossible for you to change some modes of thinking. As an example, after the dieoff at 20, comes one last dieoff, around 35 years of age. That's also the line in the sand for a person to become literate. If you don't lear how to read and write by age 35, you're never ever going to learn that particular skill.
And just so we're clear: the gray matter of the cerebrum of a newborn has double the number of layers compared to an adult cerebrum. Those layers are made up of temporary neurons that die off after a few years, once they've done their job of figuring out how to correctly connect the permanent cortex.
One could argue that the computer is just another extension of the human mind, just as pencil and paper are when used to perform calculations. Could anyone solve a differential equation without a pencil or paper? Consider Roman numerals, which were in use for centuries before the adoption of Persian/Arabic systems. Can anyone solve a differential equation using Roman numerals? It might be fun to try!
When I went to engineering college a pocket calculator cost anywhere from $250 to $500. We had to have one, but we also had to learn how to use a slide rule. Does anyone know how to use a slide rule today? As technology advances we become dependent on it, but it also extends our control over our environment. It's a trade off between what we can do with the tools at our disposal, and what we can do without them.
I think the core of the problem in education is not necessarily the tools we use, but the methods (or lack of) we use to inspire curiosity in the student. Difficult to inspire curiosity if the people tasked with inspiring it aren't themselves curious, which begs the question: is a truly curious mind satisfied with a career in teaching, or does it search for ever greater challenges to satisfy that curiosity? In short, is there really an attention deficit, or is it actually a curiosity deficit?
Also worth noting is that education today is directed by government agencies who design the curriculum, and governments in general do not appreciate excessively curious people:)
It could be the case that relying on machines to remember things for us could cause those capacities to atrophy, but most of us still have to store a lot of memories, just in a different format. For example, a kid who spends a lot of time gaming may not know anybody's telephone numbers by heart, but he would have stored some mental representation of the virtual worlds he (or his on-screen avatar) inhabits while playing video games, and that is bound to require a lot of memory. A child in a more primitive setting would store only mental representations of the single world that he actually inhabits, rather than dozens of virtual ones, and this storage of so many virtual worlds would have to crowd out the child's capacity to remember details about the real world.
I suspect you are both on to something. One issue I didn't address in the essay is how people develop "mental discipline" - or a disciplined mind. I suspect a real and formal education, like it used to be, helps people create mental control strategies and to improve the function of the frontal control system - or "supervisory system" as it is sometimes called. If all information we get is more or less fragmented and we never have to remember anything or force ourselves to control the structure of our memory - then the control system may be underdeveloped at the same time the hippocampus is overloaded with information. For example, when I was in school I created a system to memorize massive amounts of text. This was very hard to begin with but eventually became easy, enabling me to memorize hundreds of pages a day almost verbatim. If everything is on hand online and you don't have to take tests at all in school, strategies like this will never be developed. This is the other side of the coin and would be a good reason for another speculative essay. Thanks guys!
"One issue I didn't address in the essay is how people develop "mental discipline" - or a disciplined mind."
One of the basic human needs is the need for certainty. We accept authoritative explanations of things we haven't the time or capacity to determine for ourselves, and this encompasses a wide range of beliefs that simply aren't true.
My way of addressing the problem was to create something I call "Managed Uncertainty" or MU for short. The basic idea is that I can't know all there is to know about the things that matter to my survival, so I assign a degree of importance to the things I don't know. Some will be resolved later by myself or others, some will remain mysteries for my lifetime and perhaps eternity! Clint Eastwood's character Dirty Harry probably sums it up best: A man's gotta know his limitations.
Of course you learn what your limitations are by pushing the boundaries, in the process expanding your knowledge of what your limitations actually are vs what you believe them to be.
> My way of addressing the problem was to create something I call "Managed Uncertainty" or MU for short.
This idea needs to be formalised because it's been reinveted by various people in the last few decades, all of us report that it helped tremendously. Therefore, this is adaptive knowledge and needs to be propagated throughout society.
Interesting comparison - but there's this: the child in that more primitive setting would remember a huge lot, from family and family traditions to tribe traditions, the natural environment, skills: all without having recourse to electronics. That child in a modern society may well remember lots about those virtual worlds - but that memory relies on his electronic gadgets functioning, not crashing.
Of course, your final remark about that child's capacity to 'remember details about the real world' is what ought so scare us because warbling about "Nature" as seen on screen is one thing - actually going out and looking at what is right there in front of one's nose, over any length of time - years rather than hours - cannot but be detrimental to society.
Boomers and especially Gen X were exposed to enormous amounts of lead from gasoline. Subsequent generations have a significant aluminium load from vaccines, which can also damage the brain. Couple this with neurotoxic pesticides and the elimination of iodine fortification, and you've got a great recipe for multi-generational civilization-wide cognitive decline.
Don't forget processed foods full of dubious chemicals, processed seed oils and chemicals from plastic, nanoparticles and heavy metals from cosmetics and sunscreen, etc etc. We are basically living in a toxic soup.
We must also consider the discovery and exploitation of Bliss Point technology in industrial food product design and manufacture.
If a hog farmer were caught fattening pigs on the stuff we feed our children on their way to school, he could be brought up on charges of cruelty and neglect. Of course, no hog farmer would do so; it actually matters whether or not livestock thrive in good health.
What does a steady diet of refined sugar, hydrogenated lipids, and air-puffed carbohydra-foam do to a developing brain? I have read some horrifying things about the addictive pathways refined sugar cuts in the brain, but haven’t the background to evaluate the literature.
> Interestingly, people with ADHD seem to have larger hippocampi than others. (...) It seems unlikely that the larger hippocampal size in people with ADHD is a coincidence.
I have a positive feedback loop for you. :) First, all of this comment is SPECULATION. Next, some background: I presume this control over memory is done by inhibition. Specifically, that frontal cortex inhibits hipocampus. It's been over a decade since I last studied the synapses of hipocampus so I'm not certain if there exist inhibitory synapses from neocortex into hypocampus, and I'm further not sure if those synapses connect at proper places. But, if we assume the control is via inhibition, then the following positive feedback loop can set it:
1. the neocortex's control of memory (train of thought) is lacking
2. that means hipocampus isn't inhibited as much as it's supposed to be
3. since it isn't inhibited as required, it doesn't stop growing when it's supposed to
4. since it's now larger than it was when neocortex was unable to inhibit it properly, neocortex is now even less able to inhibit it
5. GOTO 1
This creates a situation of runaway growth of hipocampus above what neocortex can handle, locking the brain into permanent inability to control it's train of thought. ADHD Further, IF hipocampus retains it's ability to grow if insufficiently inhibited throughout the life of a human, then this is how burnout produces it's sequelle. During the acute part of the burnout, hipocampus was uninhibited which caused it to overgrow and now that neocortex has regained control of it, the hipocampus is relatively larger compared to neocortex's unchanged ability to inhibit it, resulting in permanently lower ability to control the train of thought.
I also find it important to note that burnout takes 10 years to manifest. "10 years" is the common time it takes the human body rebuild itself. "10 years" is about the time that all diseases that rely on tissue remodeling take to really take off (erectile disfunction, cancer, AIDS). Perhaps those astroglia are part of the operating matrix of the brain after all? ;) I mean, they do have those tight connections with neurons, plus they have their REALLY funky membrane potentials. They've got to be up to something, and since astroglia get replaced, "10 years" is mighty suspicios.
I'm not completely sure how short STM is related to this, I thought STM is implemented by frontal cortex and that hipocampus is implementing the middle-term memory (from 10 seconds ago through 6 months ago).
Anyway, somebody now needs to test the following two points:
1. there exist inhibitory synapses from ~frontal cortex into hipocampus, and furthermore into the correct locations inside the hipocampus
2. hipocampus grows in size and power if those inhibitory synapses aren't active enough
Fascinating and scary stuff. My question is what can we do to protect ourselves and those we love? Limit our working hours and screen time? Reduce multitasking? Something else? Would love to hear your thoughts.
There is an elephant in the room of which no one is speaking and that is the ever increasing number of injections of diseases and toxins from the day of birth, some of which are known to pass the blood/brain barrier, some of which accumulate in the brain (ie: aluminum), leading to cognitive decline, some of which cause massive neuronal inflammation (ie: viruses), etc.
Yeah....somehow the autism rate has exploded exponentially but hey - nothing to see here re the massive amount of required vaccines. Must be the water. God I hate modern medicine.
Thanks everyone for the stimulating discussion. As a sufferer of serious burnout I can testify that the load which becomes unbearable is sometimes self-imposed. It also depends on the quality of the load. Some loads, internal or external, are exhilarating, others are toxic.
At 67, it seems apparent that the terminal (as in ‘termination’) burnout I experienced in my mid-forties had as much to do with continually invoking an avoidance routine regarding my miserable personal life as it did with the self-imposed overload at work. After the second involuntary layoff, I finally ended the marriage, and have been improving since, with some permanent deficits.
I personally don't think children should even be in school before they are 8 or 10. Ideally they should be home and engaging in their own interests and helping around the house - learning to create their own inner world and be a part of others. Maybe their brains are shutting down because so much of what they are fed in schools are lies, irreverencies, and boring nonsense.
"Still, it will probably be one of those less-read posts."
Depth vs. Breadth. I find most authors on substack attract a following which can best be described as a 'fan club' vs. those who think deeply about their subject (whatever it might be) and that look for alternate opinions with which to compare or challenge their own.
In terms of depth, you've waded into some very deep waters because the baseline for all human action is what goes on in the brain, which at this point we only vaguely understand. Empirical statements can be made from observation and experiment, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood.
The mind examining the mind itself is what Douglas Hofstadter described as a 'strange loop.' As you inquire into the nature of thought, the material you read and the concepts you become aware of themselves become part of the tool kit. So you are basically building a ship at sea. It's an unavoidable condition since you were born on that ship by no choice of your own and have to learn the techniques of shipbuilding in order to advance the task, which by its nature is generational, or as Newton is said to have said: "If I've seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants" which is the essence of Alfred Korzybski's 'time binding.'
A suggestion I always bring to the table when the conversation turns in this direction, is to list those giants that have added to your mental toolkit - that have provided the concepts that helped you arrive at your current understanding. To that end, here is my short list.
Alfred Korzybski - Science and Sanity (1933). Foundational material in General Semantics, a term AK coined as well as 'belief systems' and 'time binding' the two activities that set us apart from the animals. Of importance is his study of 'abstract nouns' and the necessity of finding referents for the words we use so as to not be misunderstood.
Stuart Chase - The Tyranny of Words (1938). A condensation and clarification of Korzybski's work. Written for a wider audience, it's a good introduction to General Semantics.
Marshal McLuhan. Just about anything he wrote, but especially Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy. Recognition of and elaboration on the extensions of the mind that we take for granted (hidden ground) - specifically the 'media environment' but also the tools we use to manipulate that environment, for example the medium I'm using right now - the written word.
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). A foundational work on AI - an examination of what it means to be conscious and the implications for designing 'intelligent' machines. Particular attention to feedback loops, both positive and negative, that influence the way we think. In fact Hofstadter wrote a follow up book, 'I am a Strange Loop' because he felt many readers had missed the essential point of GEB. Also worth reading.
Marvin Harris - Cultural Materialism (1968). A close examination of the underlying material causes of cultural behaviour - the emics vs the etics of human behaviour i.e. the difference between why we think we do the things we do, and why we actually do them - not always concordant. Again, fundamental work, best summarized by an old aphorism: how can you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been?
I could throw a few more in there, like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Feynman, Vance Packard and so on, but 'keep it simple' is one of my mantras, which I may have already exceeded:)
I noticed a strong parallel between your last post on Reality and the work of CJ Hopkins (which is a huge compliment, BTW). I left a comment on his last post suggesting a dialogue with you. I urge you to check out his work, and contact him if you feel comfortable. I think putting the two of you together could synergistically deepen your respective insights. You two have so much to say about this strange condition we find ourselves in!
It might be interesting to learn about Dr. Michael Nehls who has done research on the role and function of the hipocampus: https://michael-nehls.com/. He approach these problems from another angle.
Interesting. I've never heard of this guy until now. Btw, it's difficult to believe that the brain is not an "objective" considering the obsession with transhumanism among certain people.
As one writer to another, please allow me to suggest you did not like this sentence when you wrote it:
“It is so important that without understanding it, there can be little understanding of anything at all regarding cognition in general – as well as massive number of phenomena in psychology.”
You rob the punch with the hyphenated add on, my friend, and this sentence is itself the crux of its section’s urgency. How about “…general. Indeed, many psychological phenomena cannot be understood without it.”
I mention this only in the expectation that you will of course be buffing this essay for a larger work to be published between covers. I found it fascinating and critically important. Many thanks.
I've always had a tendency to write unnecessarily complicated prose and that sometimes manifests itself in clumsy sentences - which I don't even notice. It's one of my failings as a writer. I'm always trying to clean it up but it's surprisingly hard. When I started working after university I was so conditioned to write in sterile "APA" style that the reports and such I wrote were incomprehensible for years.
Excellent commentary. As an old academic, even I find similar problems within myself. When a graduate student, I spent long hours reading and doing long complex math problems. Today, the internet has produced a rather short attention-spanned old man. If you don’t grab my attention in the first few minutes, I move on. This is of course bad news for reading academic books and such. I have found that (personal observations) I often have to put down a book after a few minutes and close my eyes, perhaps even doze off, then pick it up again. Sometimes this process repeats for as long as an hour. Then magically (?) my attention spans kicks in and I’m good for hours of productive reading.
I hope you are wrong with the possibility of brain damage, rather than poor training of the mind wrt concentration, but I suspect you are not. Bad habits can be broken. Brain damage?
It's been shown that certain activities enhance our mental acuity, even though the reasons are not well understood. The major activities are playing a musical instrument, learning foreign languages, especially those that use a different script, and playing games like Chess, GO or Scrabble. Spatially oriented pattern matching games also help. For example, here's one I'm playing right now:
https://www.mahjong.com/game/Mahjong+Connect
I found this game extremely frustrating when I first started, now I can make it all the way through and even get my name on the scoreboard in about 35th place...lol! If you find it too difficult start with this one, then try Majong Connect later.
https://www.mahjong.com/game/Mahjong+Birds
In your previous work you identified the changing make-up of the population on earth because of dysgenics as a potential cause of less resilience and more disorders. You might also look at vaccines.
Interesting and thought-provoking!
I wonder if ADHD might perhaps be caused by children's memory functions being under~ or undeveloped? In cultures based on oral traditions people needed to develop their memory capacity to an extent which today seems simply stunning. In the 'old' days before electronics in the form of pocket calculators made their way into class rooms, followed but the rest and now the deluge of smartphones, schoolchildren were made to learn by heart - i.e. memorise - literature, multiplication tables, mathematical rules, formulas in physics and chemistry, together with grammar rules and spelling. Nowadays, 'the computer' does it for everybody, no need to know how do even a simple addition. No need to remember anything because 'Alexa' will know the answer.
That's why I wonder if it's not so much the screen time but the easy way in which to access knowledge, without effort and without memorising it, might play a significant role in under developing memory function.
I work as a tutor. Most of my high school students don't know their multiplication tables. Memorization of any sort is considered extremely difficult and unnecessary.
The ancients divided education into three parts -- grammar (rote learning), logic (reasoning), and rhetoric (synthesizing grammar and logic to persuade). Somewhere along the line, we decided that grammar wasn't necessary and that we could jump straight to logic. Now we're seeing the fruits of that decision. Maybe our forefathers actually knew more than "doctors" of education!
I read somewhere that most of our actual learning happens in the first few years of school. This is the time when we learn how to learn, and if we haven't taken the basic concepts on board by middle school, we're just not going to do very well. Also, as I mentioned in another comment, how do you inspire curiosity in the student? What is it about us that some are curious about the world while others are not? Is it simply a measure of intelligence, or is some basic element missing in those early school years?
Think of how easy it is for children to learn a second language if they're exposed at an early age. They just soak it up like a sponge! In my day, French was compulsory from elementary school onward. Today, 50 years later, I can still read a French newspaper and watch French TV with about 60-70% comprehension, even though I rarely ever used the language and got failing grades in later school years. I also speak Spanish, but that came about via emmersion in Spanish culture along with a Spanish wife. Since those early years I've also studied Japanese, Punjabi and Russian, but progress was very slow and I don't claim fluency in any of them. Why is this? It's not for want of trying. There's something fundamentally different between the way children learn and the way adults do. This hasn't received nearly the amount of attention it deserves IMO.
For what it's worth, the human brain "matures" through a series of neuron die-offs. The second (?) largest one of these is around 19-20 years of age. If you recall your experience of those years, you may remember that at one point the world just cleared. It became straightforward, you became able to grasp the thing. That was actually the brain killing off all the neurons it wasn't using, and that were causing the cacophony in your head. xD The dieoff quited the brain down and enabled you to really focus on things. But the tradeoff is that now you lost the plasticity of the brain: it's now impossible for you to change some modes of thinking. As an example, after the dieoff at 20, comes one last dieoff, around 35 years of age. That's also the line in the sand for a person to become literate. If you don't lear how to read and write by age 35, you're never ever going to learn that particular skill.
And just so we're clear: the gray matter of the cerebrum of a newborn has double the number of layers compared to an adult cerebrum. Those layers are made up of temporary neurons that die off after a few years, once they've done their job of figuring out how to correctly connect the permanent cortex.
One could argue that the computer is just another extension of the human mind, just as pencil and paper are when used to perform calculations. Could anyone solve a differential equation without a pencil or paper? Consider Roman numerals, which were in use for centuries before the adoption of Persian/Arabic systems. Can anyone solve a differential equation using Roman numerals? It might be fun to try!
When I went to engineering college a pocket calculator cost anywhere from $250 to $500. We had to have one, but we also had to learn how to use a slide rule. Does anyone know how to use a slide rule today? As technology advances we become dependent on it, but it also extends our control over our environment. It's a trade off between what we can do with the tools at our disposal, and what we can do without them.
I think the core of the problem in education is not necessarily the tools we use, but the methods (or lack of) we use to inspire curiosity in the student. Difficult to inspire curiosity if the people tasked with inspiring it aren't themselves curious, which begs the question: is a truly curious mind satisfied with a career in teaching, or does it search for ever greater challenges to satisfy that curiosity? In short, is there really an attention deficit, or is it actually a curiosity deficit?
Also worth noting is that education today is directed by government agencies who design the curriculum, and governments in general do not appreciate excessively curious people:)
I was such a teacher, curious and excited by learning. An outlier to be sure.
It could be the case that relying on machines to remember things for us could cause those capacities to atrophy, but most of us still have to store a lot of memories, just in a different format. For example, a kid who spends a lot of time gaming may not know anybody's telephone numbers by heart, but he would have stored some mental representation of the virtual worlds he (or his on-screen avatar) inhabits while playing video games, and that is bound to require a lot of memory. A child in a more primitive setting would store only mental representations of the single world that he actually inhabits, rather than dozens of virtual ones, and this storage of so many virtual worlds would have to crowd out the child's capacity to remember details about the real world.
I suspect you are both on to something. One issue I didn't address in the essay is how people develop "mental discipline" - or a disciplined mind. I suspect a real and formal education, like it used to be, helps people create mental control strategies and to improve the function of the frontal control system - or "supervisory system" as it is sometimes called. If all information we get is more or less fragmented and we never have to remember anything or force ourselves to control the structure of our memory - then the control system may be underdeveloped at the same time the hippocampus is overloaded with information. For example, when I was in school I created a system to memorize massive amounts of text. This was very hard to begin with but eventually became easy, enabling me to memorize hundreds of pages a day almost verbatim. If everything is on hand online and you don't have to take tests at all in school, strategies like this will never be developed. This is the other side of the coin and would be a good reason for another speculative essay. Thanks guys!
"One issue I didn't address in the essay is how people develop "mental discipline" - or a disciplined mind."
One of the basic human needs is the need for certainty. We accept authoritative explanations of things we haven't the time or capacity to determine for ourselves, and this encompasses a wide range of beliefs that simply aren't true.
My way of addressing the problem was to create something I call "Managed Uncertainty" or MU for short. The basic idea is that I can't know all there is to know about the things that matter to my survival, so I assign a degree of importance to the things I don't know. Some will be resolved later by myself or others, some will remain mysteries for my lifetime and perhaps eternity! Clint Eastwood's character Dirty Harry probably sums it up best: A man's gotta know his limitations.
Of course you learn what your limitations are by pushing the boundaries, in the process expanding your knowledge of what your limitations actually are vs what you believe them to be.
> My way of addressing the problem was to create something I call "Managed Uncertainty" or MU for short.
This idea needs to be formalised because it's been reinveted by various people in the last few decades, all of us report that it helped tremendously. Therefore, this is adaptive knowledge and needs to be propagated throughout society.
You’ve raised some fascinating possibilities. Thanks for all the great food for thought!
Interesting comparison - but there's this: the child in that more primitive setting would remember a huge lot, from family and family traditions to tribe traditions, the natural environment, skills: all without having recourse to electronics. That child in a modern society may well remember lots about those virtual worlds - but that memory relies on his electronic gadgets functioning, not crashing.
Of course, your final remark about that child's capacity to 'remember details about the real world' is what ought so scare us because warbling about "Nature" as seen on screen is one thing - actually going out and looking at what is right there in front of one's nose, over any length of time - years rather than hours - cannot but be detrimental to society.
I added a short abstract to the essay for clarity.
Boomers and especially Gen X were exposed to enormous amounts of lead from gasoline. Subsequent generations have a significant aluminium load from vaccines, which can also damage the brain. Couple this with neurotoxic pesticides and the elimination of iodine fortification, and you've got a great recipe for multi-generational civilization-wide cognitive decline.
Don't forget processed foods full of dubious chemicals, processed seed oils and chemicals from plastic, nanoparticles and heavy metals from cosmetics and sunscreen, etc etc. We are basically living in a toxic soup.
We must also consider the discovery and exploitation of Bliss Point technology in industrial food product design and manufacture.
If a hog farmer were caught fattening pigs on the stuff we feed our children on their way to school, he could be brought up on charges of cruelty and neglect. Of course, no hog farmer would do so; it actually matters whether or not livestock thrive in good health.
What does a steady diet of refined sugar, hydrogenated lipids, and air-puffed carbohydra-foam do to a developing brain? I have read some horrifying things about the addictive pathways refined sugar cuts in the brain, but haven’t the background to evaluate the literature.
Thanks again for a wonderful read.
> Interestingly, people with ADHD seem to have larger hippocampi than others. (...) It seems unlikely that the larger hippocampal size in people with ADHD is a coincidence.
I have a positive feedback loop for you. :) First, all of this comment is SPECULATION. Next, some background: I presume this control over memory is done by inhibition. Specifically, that frontal cortex inhibits hipocampus. It's been over a decade since I last studied the synapses of hipocampus so I'm not certain if there exist inhibitory synapses from neocortex into hypocampus, and I'm further not sure if those synapses connect at proper places. But, if we assume the control is via inhibition, then the following positive feedback loop can set it:
1. the neocortex's control of memory (train of thought) is lacking
2. that means hipocampus isn't inhibited as much as it's supposed to be
3. since it isn't inhibited as required, it doesn't stop growing when it's supposed to
4. since it's now larger than it was when neocortex was unable to inhibit it properly, neocortex is now even less able to inhibit it
5. GOTO 1
This creates a situation of runaway growth of hipocampus above what neocortex can handle, locking the brain into permanent inability to control it's train of thought. ADHD Further, IF hipocampus retains it's ability to grow if insufficiently inhibited throughout the life of a human, then this is how burnout produces it's sequelle. During the acute part of the burnout, hipocampus was uninhibited which caused it to overgrow and now that neocortex has regained control of it, the hipocampus is relatively larger compared to neocortex's unchanged ability to inhibit it, resulting in permanently lower ability to control the train of thought.
I also find it important to note that burnout takes 10 years to manifest. "10 years" is the common time it takes the human body rebuild itself. "10 years" is about the time that all diseases that rely on tissue remodeling take to really take off (erectile disfunction, cancer, AIDS). Perhaps those astroglia are part of the operating matrix of the brain after all? ;) I mean, they do have those tight connections with neurons, plus they have their REALLY funky membrane potentials. They've got to be up to something, and since astroglia get replaced, "10 years" is mighty suspicios.
I'm not completely sure how short STM is related to this, I thought STM is implemented by frontal cortex and that hipocampus is implementing the middle-term memory (from 10 seconds ago through 6 months ago).
Anyway, somebody now needs to test the following two points:
1. there exist inhibitory synapses from ~frontal cortex into hipocampus, and furthermore into the correct locations inside the hipocampus
2. hipocampus grows in size and power if those inhibitory synapses aren't active enough
Fascinating and scary stuff. My question is what can we do to protect ourselves and those we love? Limit our working hours and screen time? Reduce multitasking? Something else? Would love to hear your thoughts.
There is an elephant in the room of which no one is speaking and that is the ever increasing number of injections of diseases and toxins from the day of birth, some of which are known to pass the blood/brain barrier, some of which accumulate in the brain (ie: aluminum), leading to cognitive decline, some of which cause massive neuronal inflammation (ie: viruses), etc.
Yeah....somehow the autism rate has exploded exponentially but hey - nothing to see here re the massive amount of required vaccines. Must be the water. God I hate modern medicine.
Thanks everyone for the stimulating discussion. As a sufferer of serious burnout I can testify that the load which becomes unbearable is sometimes self-imposed. It also depends on the quality of the load. Some loads, internal or external, are exhilarating, others are toxic.
At 67, it seems apparent that the terminal (as in ‘termination’) burnout I experienced in my mid-forties had as much to do with continually invoking an avoidance routine regarding my miserable personal life as it did with the self-imposed overload at work. After the second involuntary layoff, I finally ended the marriage, and have been improving since, with some permanent deficits.
I am glad for you that things are improving. Stay strong.
I personally don't think children should even be in school before they are 8 or 10. Ideally they should be home and engaging in their own interests and helping around the house - learning to create their own inner world and be a part of others. Maybe their brains are shutting down because so much of what they are fed in schools are lies, irreverencies, and boring nonsense.
Thank you so much for this most interesting text. I normally never write a comment. But this positive signal has to be. With the utmost respect!
"Still, it will probably be one of those less-read posts."
Depth vs. Breadth. I find most authors on substack attract a following which can best be described as a 'fan club' vs. those who think deeply about their subject (whatever it might be) and that look for alternate opinions with which to compare or challenge their own.
In terms of depth, you've waded into some very deep waters because the baseline for all human action is what goes on in the brain, which at this point we only vaguely understand. Empirical statements can be made from observation and experiment, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood.
The mind examining the mind itself is what Douglas Hofstadter described as a 'strange loop.' As you inquire into the nature of thought, the material you read and the concepts you become aware of themselves become part of the tool kit. So you are basically building a ship at sea. It's an unavoidable condition since you were born on that ship by no choice of your own and have to learn the techniques of shipbuilding in order to advance the task, which by its nature is generational, or as Newton is said to have said: "If I've seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants" which is the essence of Alfred Korzybski's 'time binding.'
A suggestion I always bring to the table when the conversation turns in this direction, is to list those giants that have added to your mental toolkit - that have provided the concepts that helped you arrive at your current understanding. To that end, here is my short list.
Alfred Korzybski - Science and Sanity (1933). Foundational material in General Semantics, a term AK coined as well as 'belief systems' and 'time binding' the two activities that set us apart from the animals. Of importance is his study of 'abstract nouns' and the necessity of finding referents for the words we use so as to not be misunderstood.
Stuart Chase - The Tyranny of Words (1938). A condensation and clarification of Korzybski's work. Written for a wider audience, it's a good introduction to General Semantics.
Marshal McLuhan. Just about anything he wrote, but especially Understanding Media and Gutenberg Galaxy. Recognition of and elaboration on the extensions of the mind that we take for granted (hidden ground) - specifically the 'media environment' but also the tools we use to manipulate that environment, for example the medium I'm using right now - the written word.
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). A foundational work on AI - an examination of what it means to be conscious and the implications for designing 'intelligent' machines. Particular attention to feedback loops, both positive and negative, that influence the way we think. In fact Hofstadter wrote a follow up book, 'I am a Strange Loop' because he felt many readers had missed the essential point of GEB. Also worth reading.
Marvin Harris - Cultural Materialism (1968). A close examination of the underlying material causes of cultural behaviour - the emics vs the etics of human behaviour i.e. the difference between why we think we do the things we do, and why we actually do them - not always concordant. Again, fundamental work, best summarized by an old aphorism: how can you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been?
I could throw a few more in there, like Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Feynman, Vance Packard and so on, but 'keep it simple' is one of my mantras, which I may have already exceeded:)
I noticed a strong parallel between your last post on Reality and the work of CJ Hopkins (which is a huge compliment, BTW). I left a comment on his last post suggesting a dialogue with you. I urge you to check out his work, and contact him if you feel comfortable. I think putting the two of you together could synergistically deepen your respective insights. You two have so much to say about this strange condition we find ourselves in!
It might be interesting to learn about Dr. Michael Nehls who has done research on the role and function of the hipocampus: https://michael-nehls.com/. He approach these problems from another angle.
Interesting. I've never heard of this guy until now. Btw, it's difficult to believe that the brain is not an "objective" considering the obsession with transhumanism among certain people.
As one writer to another, please allow me to suggest you did not like this sentence when you wrote it:
“It is so important that without understanding it, there can be little understanding of anything at all regarding cognition in general – as well as massive number of phenomena in psychology.”
You rob the punch with the hyphenated add on, my friend, and this sentence is itself the crux of its section’s urgency. How about “…general. Indeed, many psychological phenomena cannot be understood without it.”
I mention this only in the expectation that you will of course be buffing this essay for a larger work to be published between covers. I found it fascinating and critically important. Many thanks.
I've always had a tendency to write unnecessarily complicated prose and that sometimes manifests itself in clumsy sentences - which I don't even notice. It's one of my failings as a writer. I'm always trying to clean it up but it's surprisingly hard. When I started working after university I was so conditioned to write in sterile "APA" style that the reports and such I wrote were incomprehensible for years.
In addition, I think this study has importance for the topic discussed the post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anSjZS63T7s