Stone Age brains and the social web

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting. 

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?

"Human 2.0"—unfounded techno-optimism

Nick Carr reports, with seeming credulity:

"The age of Human 2.0 is here," proclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in launching a new Media Lab initiative to create an improved human being.

Sounds like these guys could do with reading up a little on the subtle verities of evolutionary psychology. Oh, but acknowledging the culturally and biologically-embedded nature of our evolution wouldn't make for such a techno-optimistic strapline, I guess. ; )

Leda Cosmides on Transhumanism

Yesterday, I listened (twice!) to an absoluting mind-blowing podcast (30 minutes) from All in the Mind of a lecture on Transhumanism by evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides.

From the podcast notes:

Transhumanists are hell-bent on extending their lives beyond the current limits of the flesh, by exploiting cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics and nanotechnology. Engineering evolution is their goal. But can they re-engineer our Darwinian mind? Leda Cosmides, renowned pioneer of the controversial field evolutionary psychology, asks, 'Are We Already Transhuman?'

Lena demonstrates how our minds and behaviours have co-evolved with our environment over millenia; that we are not and cannot ever be separate from that environment—or from our own human identity. Woven around this central theme are a wealth of telling observations on the nature of memory, cognition and identity.

A must-listen for all identity truth-seekers.