The Human Age (24 page)
How Anthropocene that we “condition” the very air we breathe, flavoring its essence. For most of human history, we simply breathed the air that surrounded us, whatever nature delivered, whether it was fume-laced from oil deposits or salty-fishy from the coast. Before the Industrial Revolution, neighbors inhaled similar air. Now we tailor
the breath that streams into and out of us. Neighbors may prefer their homes warmer, cooler, candle-scented, more humid, redolent of ammonia or bleach, cleaned by UV lights or “ozone-spiced” bulbs. We personalize our air!
We don’t find any of this strange, don’t regard it as unnatural. We don’t even notice it unless the electricity goes out, and then it’s as if the electric in our cells failed and we feel
disconnected
, a word we use when speaking of both power outages and psychic alienation (which feels like our inner grid has blown a million fuses). We too are electric, after all, a hive of minute, usually imperceptible jolts, as electrical signals leap like mountain goats from cell to cell throughout the body. Electricity, the brain’s telegraph, is almost instantaneous. Pinch a nerve in your back and dancing knives prick your skin. Pinch a nerve in your neck and a tiny electrocutioner throws a switch. But sexual tingles and jolts we find shockingly pleasurable, “electric flesh-arrows,” as Anaïs Nin calls them.
Electricity is a molecular tug-of-war. Life forms can’t exist without electric pumps in each cell. Ions of potassium and sodium, flowing into and out of a cell, produce a wave. The sodium is forced out, the potassium rushes in, the potassium is pushed out of another cell, the sodium rushes in, and so on. Ions fly like balls tossed by a one-armed juggler. It’s balance gone awry, regained, and lost again.
We reject things deemed too “wobbly,” “rickety,” or “unsteady.” We may condemn a person for being “unstable,” “unhinged,” or “unbalanced.” Yet deep in every cell, even the most slothful of us are falling out of balance and recovering. The body’s inner electric is not a steady stream. How ironic it is that we fight change in our lives and yearn for a state of permanence no life form can manage without dying—because we’re forever tumbling and snatching ourselves up before we smack the dirt and stay down.
Just as electricity ghosts throughout modern buildings everywhere and all the time, the same will soon be true of digital technology, woven into the walls, flowing through the floors, hidden all around and upon us. We’ll completely clothe ourselves in it,
swim in it. As with the natural and man-made electric in our lives, we’ll probably ignore the clouds of technology we float on, under, and inside everywhere all the time. The brain relishes familiarity, loves being on autopilot, because then it can slur over the details and spend most of its sparking on something else. At the Oshkosh Airshow I attended one summer, the first wing-walker atop an old biplane drew gasps from thousands of people brought to a halt in amazement. The second fetched an anthology of admiring stares. By the third, a surprising number of people were blasé and continued milling about, chatting or shopping. You could almost hear their brains moaning,
Oh, that again, another wing-walker
. It doesn’t take much for a novelty to become invisible. And yet, isn’t this what we wish from exciting new technology, for it to slide invisibly into our lives, making them effortless and more enjoyable?
We’ll get used to living inside a digital bubble. Unless, perhaps, we must think hard when we connect via a brain-computer interface to the house’s fixtures. But even then, habit being what it is, we’d most likely come home, absentmindedly recall the code opening the front door’s lock, step over the threshold, daydream a hand swiping a light switch until the room brightens, mind’s-eye visualize the solar-electric shingles melting ice jams on the roof, while simultaneously worrying over a supposed affront at work or rebuff at school, anticipating dinner, fantasizing about a cute guy or gal, and hearing a stupid tune lodged in some spiky thicket of the brain.
Whether it’s hospital chairs robed in silver nanojackets to ward off bacteria, or invisibility cloaks, or degradable electronic devices that dissolve when you’re finished with them, or thin, flexible solar panels that can be printed or painted onto a surface, the writing is on the wall (though you’ll need a microscope to read it). And when it comes to the delicate balance of Earth’s life forms, it may be a small, small world after all.
I
t is winter in upstate New York, on a morning so cold the ground squeaks loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rub together. The trees look like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. Something lurches from side to side up the trunk of an old sycamore—a nuthatch climbing in zigzags, on the prowl for hibernating insects. A crow veers overhead, then lands. As snow flurries begin, it leaps into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.
Another life form curves into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers, which are busily texting on some handheld device. This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.
We don’t find it strange that, in the Human Age, slimy, hairy, oozing, thorny, smelly, seed-crackling, pollen-strewn nature is digital. It’s finger-swiped across, shared with others over, and honeycombed
in our devices. For the first time in human history, we’re mainly experiencing nature through intermediary technology that, paradoxically, provides more detail while also flattening the sensory experience. Because we have riotously visual, novelty-loving brains, we’re entranced by electronic media’s caged hallucinations. Over time, can that affect the hemispheric balance of the brain and dramatically change us? Are we able to influence our evolution through the objects we dream up and rely on?
We may possess the same brain our prehistoric ancestors did, but we’re deploying it in different ways, rewiring it to meet twenty-first-century demands. The Neanderthals didn’t have the same mental real estate that modern humans enjoy, gained from a host of skills and preoccupations—wielding laser scalpels, joyriding in cars, navigating the digital seas of computers, iPhones, and iPads. Generation by generation, our brains have been evolving new networks, new ways of wiring and firing, favoring some behaviors and discarding others, as we train ourselves to meet the challenges of a world we keep amplifying, editing, deconstructing, and recreating.
Through lack of practice, our brains have gradually lost their mental maps for how to read hoofprints, choose the perfect flints for arrows, capture and transport fire, tell time by plant and animal clocks, navigate by landmarks and the stars. Our ancestors had a better gift for observing and paying attention than we do. They had to: their lives depended on it. Today, paying attention as if your life depends on it can be a bugbear requiring conscious effort. More and more people are doing all of their reading on screens, and studies find that they’re retaining 46 percent less information than when they read printed pages. It’s not clear why. Have all the distractions shortened our attention spans? Do the light displays interfere with memory? It’s not like watching animals in ordinary life. Onscreen, what we’re really seeing isn’t the animal at all, but just three hundred thousand tiny phosphorescent dots flickering. A lion on TV doesn’t exist until your brain concocts an image, piecemeal, from the pattern of scintillating dots.
College students are testing about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of twenty or thirty years ago. Is that because social media has replaced face-to-face encounters? We are not the most socially connected we’ve ever been—that was when we lived in small tribes. In our cells and instincts, we still crave that sense of belonging, and fear being exiles, because for our ancestors living alone in the wild, without the group protection of the tribe, meant almost certain death. Those with a strong social instinct survived to pass their genes along to the next generation. We still follow that instinct by flocking to social media, which connects us to a vast multicultural human tribe—even though it isn’t always personal.
Many of our inventions have reinvented us, both physically and mentally. Through texting, a child’s brain map of the thumbs grows larger. Our teeth were sharper and stronger before we invented cooking; now, they’re blunt and fragile. Even cheap and easily crafted inventions can be powerful catalysts. The novelty of simple leather stirrups advanced warfare, helped to topple empires, and introduced the custom of romantic “courtly” love to the British Isles in the eleventh century. Before stirrups, wielding either a bow and arrow or a javelin, a rider might easily tumble off his horse. Stirrups added lateral stability, and soldiers learned the art of charging with lances at rest, creating terror as their horses drove the lances home. Fighting in this specialized way, an aristocracy of well-armed and -armored warriors emerged, and feudalism arose as a way to finance these knights, whose code of chivalry and courtly love quickly dominated Western society. In 1066, William the Conqueror’s army was outnumbered at the Battle of Hastings, but, by using mounted shock warfare, he won England anyway, and introduced a feudal society steeped in stirrups and the romance of courtly love.
Tinkering with plows and harnesses, beyond just alleviating the difficult work of breaking ground, meant farmers could plant a third-season crop of protein-rich beans, which fortified the brain, and some historians believe that this brain boost, right at the end of the Dark Ages, ushered in the Renaissance. Improved ship hulls spread
exotic goods and ideas around the continents—as well as vermin and diseases. Electricity allowed us to homestead the night as if it were an invisible country. Remember, Thomas Edison perfected the lightbulb by candle or gas-lamp light.
Our inventions don’t just change our minds; they modify our gray and white matter, rewiring the brain and priming it for a different mode of living, problem-solving, and adapting. In the process, a tapestry of new thoughts arises, and one’s worldview changes. Think how the nuclear bomb altered warfare, diplomacy, and our debates about morality. Think how television shoved wars and disasters into our living rooms, how cars and airplanes broadened everything from our leisure to our gene pool, how painting evolved when paints became portable, how the printing press remodeled the spread of ideas and the possibility of shared knowledge. Think how Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of things in motion—horses running, humans broad-jumping—awakened our understanding of anatomy and everyday actions.
Or think how the invention of the typewriter transformed the lives of women, great numbers of whom could leave the house with dignity to become secretaries. Although they won the opportunity because their dexterous little fingers were considered better able to push the keys, working in so-called pools they risked such bold ideas as their right to vote. Even the low-tech bicycle modified the lives of women. Straddling a bike was easier if they donned bloomers—large billowy pants that revealed little more than that they had legs—which scandalized society. They had to remove their suffocating “strait-laced” corsets in order to ride. Since that seemed wicked, the idea of “loose” women became synonymous with low morals.
In ancient days, our language areas grew because we found the rumpled currency of language lifesaving, not to mention heady, seductive, and fun. Language became our plumage and claws. The more talkative among us lived to pass on their genes to chatty offspring. Language may be essential, but the invention of reading and writing was pure luxury. The uphill march children find in learning
how to read reminds us that it may be one of our best tools, but it’s not an instinct. I didn’t learn to read with fluent ease until I was in college. It takes countless hours of practice to fine-tune a brain for reading. Or anything else.
Near- or farsightedness was always assumed to be hereditary. No more. In the United States, one-third of all adults are now myopic, and nearsightedness has been soaring in Europe as well. In Asia, the numbers are staggering. A recent study testing the eyesight of students in Shanghai and young men in Seoul reported that 95 percent were nearsighted. From Canberra to Ohio, one finds similar myopia, a generation of people who can’t see the forest for the trees. This malady, known as “urban eyes,” stems from spending too much time indoors, crouched over small screens. Our eyeballs adjust by changing shape, growing longer, which is bad news for those of us squinting to see far away. For normal eye growth, children need to play outside, maybe watching how a squirrel’s nest, high atop an old hickory tree, sways in the wind, then zooming down to the runnel-rib on an individual blade of grass. Is that brown curtsey at the bottom of the yard a wild turkey or a windblown chrysanthemum?
In the past, bands of humans hunted and gathered, eyes nimble, keenly attuned to a nearby scuffle or a distant dust-mist, as they struggled to survive. Natural light, peripheral images, a long field of view, lots of vitamin D, an ever-present horizon, and a caravan of visual feedback shaped their eyes. They chipped flint and arrowheads, flayed and stitched hides, and did other close work, but not for the entire day. Close work now dominates our lives, but that’s very recent, one of the Anthropocene’s hallmarks, and we may evolve into a more myopic species.
Studies also show that Google is affecting our memory in chilling ways. We more easily forget anything we know we can find online, and we tend to remember where online information is located, rather than the information itself.
Long ago, the human tribe met to share food, expertise, ideas, and feelings. The keen-eyed observations they exchanged about
the weather, landscape, and animals saved lives on a daily basis. Now there are so many of us that it’s not convenient to sit around a campfire. Electronic campfires are the next best thing. We’ve reimagined space, turning the Internet into a favorite pub, a common meeting place where we can exchange knowledge or know-how or even meet a future mate. The sharing of information is fast, unfiltered, and sloppy. Our nervous systems are living in a stream of such data, influenced not just by the environment—as was the case for millennia—but abstractly, virtually. How has this changed our notion of reality? Without our brain we’re not real, but when our brain is plugged into a virtual world, then that becomes real. The body remains in physical space, while the brain travels in a virtual space that is both nowhere and everywhere at once.