Human Brain Adaptation To The Modern World

Keywords

Personal Reflections

We think of modernity as a march toward constant improvement. But, now, I see it more like climbing stairs—two steps up, one step down.

One of the big things that opened the door for me to question modernity is the plateau in happiness in developed countries:

Source
Source

More recently, I've shocked to see the life expectancy in the United States has actually been decreasing.

Source:
Source: World Bank

It made me wonder, "Are we really evolving if we're not actually getting happier and living longer? Are these just temporary blips or are they the first symptoms of a much deeper challenge?"

In his book, The Story Of The Human Body, researcher Daniel Lieberman makes the case that: "Many of the diseases or discomforts that we face today (e.g. high blood pressure, cancer, cavities) arise from “mismatches” in our cultural and biological evolution. Mismatches basically occur when the inputs from our environment are:

  • Too much (eating)
  • Too little (exercise)
  • Too new (screens)

...for our bodies to handle.

The challenges are serious and often invisible, but they really add up. As a first step, we need to become aware of symptoms...

Symptoms Of Modernity

Food

  • Salt
  • Manufactured Food
  • Sugar
  • Fat

Sleep

  • Sleep deprivation
  • Insomnia
  • Sleep depth
  • Sleep apnea
  • Screens keeping us up

Exercise / Body

  • Chronic pain
  • Flat feet
  • Bad posture
  • Obesity
  • High blood pressure
  • Biome depletion
  • Vitamin D deficiency
  • Near-sightedness
  • Diabetes
  • Low bone density

Mental

  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Over-Stimulation
  • Post-Partum Depression
  • Eating disorders in women
  • "Hurry Sickness"
  • "Yuppie Flu"

Family

  • Higher divorce rates
  • Elders not living with family
  • Population decline

Medical

  • Over-prescription
  • People should not have to suffer

Happiness

  • Increase in deaths of despair
  • Increased addiction

Mouth

  • Chewing less hard food
  • Smaller jaws
  • Increase in cavities
  • More crooked teeth

Climate

  • More droughts
  • Global warming
  • More floods
  • Reduced biodiversity

Disease

  • More disease as we go deeper into natural habitats

Chain Reaction

To be understand what's happening, it's helpful to divide the overall situation into its parts and then see how they are connected.

  1. Root causes. Fundamental changes like digitization
  2. Immediate results. Globalization, acceleration, winner-take-most, etc.
  3. Second-order effects. Like the ones that are listed above on the world, institutions, individuals, etc.
  4. Coping.
    1. New values
    2. Regulations
    3. Equal opportunity / redistribution of wealth
    4. Ideological movement for slowness and anti-acceleration (read more)
    5. Retreats. "Retreats at monasteries or courses in meditation, yoga techniques, and so on as belonging in this category insofar as they are meant in the end to serve the goal of coping with the swift-paced life of the workplace, relationships, or everyday routine even more successfully, i.e., faster, afterward."
    6. "Acceleration by means of institutional pausing and the guaranteed maintenance of background conditions."

Related

  • Robert Kegan work on society getting more complex and us getting in over our heads
  • Theo Dawson work on matching roles and skills
  • Flynn Effect

What's New

Information Sources

Devices

  • Smartwatches
  • Phones
  • Laptops

Notifications On Devices

Miscellaneous

  • Higher population densities
  • Reduced sunlight
  • Reduced exposure to nature
  • Greater dispersal of families
  • Less Vitamin C
  • Proliferation of attractive individuals encountered electronically
  • Exposed to less nature
  • More sedentary
  • Ingest processed foods and substances.
  • Bad follow cues
  • Nepotism
  • Faster rate of change
  • Unpredictability. Ambiguity
  • Contradiction / multiple perspectives
  • Global

Accordingly, psychological and physiological mechanisms that process these types of inputs are particularly likely to be affected by mismatch. Such mechanisms include ones that assess mate value and mating opportunities, reproductive timing, relationship commitment, life satisfaction, competition, resource and social support availability, and nutrition (e.g., Kanazawa & Li, 2015; Yong, Li, Valentine, & Smith, 2017).

I'm particularly interested in the less visible changes happening in our brain. These are often overlooked and harder to attribute. To give context on the difficulty of attribution, I think of back pain.

About 10 years ago, I started having bad back pain. My low point was one day where my neck seized and it was extremely difficult to move it in any direction, and I didn't know why. First, I took some aspirin just to deal with the pain. I also hoped it would go away in a day, but it didn't. In fact, it got worse. So, I went to a therapeutic masseuse. It dramatically helped, and I felt good again. But, a few weeks later, the symptoms came back. So, for awhile, I went to the masseuse every month or so just to stay pain free. I also tried a chiropractor and stretches but those didn't help much. It was only after a year or so, that someone suggested I might want to go to a podiatrist to get my feet looked at. I went to one, and it turned out I had flat feet. So, I got special insoles for my feet. Amazingly, my problems with my neck and back disappeared. I would've never guessed that the issues with my neck would have come from my feet. I later learned that flat feet are a symptom of wearing shoes. As a result, our arches drop because they're forced to strengthen.

This experience woke me up to challenges of mismatches with our environment and how hard they can be to assess.

The Speed Of Change Is The Real Issue

Downsides to technological evolution aren't a new thing.

We see it in the agricultural revolution and industrial as talked about in The Story Of The Human Body and Sapiens.

When new technologies arrive, it takes time to adapt to the downsides. We adapt through new laws, technology, and cultural change.

The real issue and surprise is the rate of change. If the technological evolution surpasses our ability as individuals and societies to react to it, and the gap grows over time, this is the real issue.

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Demands Of Modern Life

  • Modern life has a higher cognitive demand
    • Skills
    • Information
    • Complexity of our consciousness

Info Overwhelm

Even the ever-accelerating flow of information to our eyes and to our ears—information competing for our attention, our allegiance, and our money—makes a claim on us to do something with it, and, even before that, to decide about it, since there is no possible way we can do even a fraction of what we are asked. These expectations are chronicled, and even shaped, in the growing collection of cultural documents academics call (with no irony) “literatures”: “the marriage literature,” “the management literature,” “the adult education literature,” and the like. After reading widely in these literatures I have come to two conclusions: First, the expectations upon us that run throughout these literatures demand something more than mere behavior, the acquisition of specific skills, or the mastery of particular knowledge. They make demands on our minds, on how we know, on the complexity of our consciousness. The “information highway” we plan for the next century, for example, may geometrically increase the amount of information, the ways it can be sent, and the number of its recipients. But our experience on this highway may be one of exhaustion (a new kind of “rat race” or “gridlock”) rather than admiration for the ease and speed of a new kind of transport if we are unable to assert our own authority over the information. No additional amount of information coming into our minds will enable us to assume this authority; only a qualitative change in the complexity of our minds will. Second, for the most part, these literatures do not talk to each other, take no account of each other, have nothing to do with each other... The result—if we continue the metaphor of the culture as school—is that we may have a school in which each of the departments is passionately engaged in its demands upon its students, but no one is considering the students’ overall experience, their actual course of study and the meaning for them of the curriculum as a whole. —Robert Kegan in In Over Our Heads.

Technology

Citizenship

  • Voting

Be Healthy (Diet, Sleep, Exercise)

Paid Employment

Marriage

Raising Children

Evolutionary Direction

One of my favorite books is What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. I like the frame of the book in that it has you think about the directionality of evolution.

When I perform the same thought experiment, here are some of the things I come up with.

  • Feeling good fast (sugar, salt, fat, temperature regulation, porn, drugs, money) 0
  • Avoiding pain (physical pain, inconvenience, movement, delay
  • Efficiency (more from less)

We can explore the implications of these in our science fiction:

  • In Brave New World, we can see a whole society addicted to a drug called soma, which helps them avoid ever having to feel pain.
  • In The Giver and Fahrenheit 451, a society is not allowed to think freely because some thoughts are considered dangerous and harmful. We can see the harbingers of this today with micro-aggressions and political correctness and censorship of people and ideas.

On a more concrete level, this means a few things...

  • Exercise doesn't happen naturally as part of our lifestyle. So, we need to find the time for pain essentially. Only 20% of adults are actually able to do this. This will only accelerate as people don't go to office to work or stores to shop.
  • There are higher demands on our will-power. There are huge temptations from

Modern Challenges

  • Social connectedness. On the one hand, we have way more social connectedness via the Internet and that is causing issues. On the other hand, we might actually have less connectedness in-person. It almost requires us relabeling what loneliness is.
  • Losing coping tools. "ways we are inherently equipped to cope with stress, such as interpersonal support, the structure of tradition, greenspace with places to explore, and the fatalistic luxury of having no choice... We are more isolated from others and from the cultural and natural resources, which provide us with the information and experiences we need to live our lives. That work falls to us internally and is largely taken up by the PFC." —Mark Rego in Frontal Fatigue
  • Taking more responsibility for our outward circumstances. "With regard to this book, there are two scientists, without whom there would be nothing about the brain to write. Professor Amy Arnsten, PhD, of Yale University and Professor Donald T. Stuss, PhD, of the University of Toronto (who passed away in 2019) were both instrumental in the establishment of their respective fields in the study of the prefrontal cortex." —Mark Rego in Frontal Fatigue
  • Super Stimulators
  • Increasing cost of healthcase as a percent of our GDP

Grandparents

Pros

Cons

  • Less comfortable (long walks to school)
  • Boredom

Modern Kids

Pros

  • Constant connectivity
  • Access (all movies, tv, games)
  • Convenience

Cons

  • Addiction

Root Causes

  • FOMO - You are aware of a much wider set of other people's accomplishments.
  • Extreme Competition - More and better competitors - competing globally.
  • Lot more info to process -
    • Innovation
    • Cultural shifts
    • Investing
  • More volatility
  • Complexity
  • Loss of autonomy
  • Desire for efficiency
  • Desire for controllabiility as a fundamental desire.

The Brain Is Changing

  • "Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds." —Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDEST People In The World.

Cultural Forces Shaping Our Brain

  • Alphabet
  • Literacy
  • Digitization
  • Internet
  • Monetization

Things Gen Z Grew Up With As Normal That Millenials Didn't Have

  • War (Iraq, Afghanistan)
  • Social Media
  • Mobile devices (phones, ipads, smart watches)
  • Unlimited information

What Gets Different

  • Needing faster rewards (getting bored more easily)
  • Having a larger group of people to judge one self against (winner take most dynamics with reputation)
  • Less sleep (bright lights, productivity focus)
  • Psychology
    • Practices
    • Values
    • Beliefs
    • Institutions
      • Governments
      • Laws
      • Religions
      • Commerce

What Gets Better

  • By driving up literacy, culture induced more analytic thinking and longer memories while spurring formal schooling, book production, and knowledge dissemination.

What Gets Worse

  • "A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate." —Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDEST People In The World.

The Brain Is Changing

Related Links

Book Summaries

Studies