David Brooks has a superb essay in last month’s New Yorker that explains some of the discoveries in neurology have helped us understand a little bit more of the human mind:
“During the question-and-answer period, though, a woman asked the neuroscientist how his studies had changed the way he lived. He paused for a second, and then starting talking about a group he had joined called the Russian-American Folk Dance Company. It was odd, given how hard and scientific he had sounded. “I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and established certain alliances with colleagues and friends,” he said. “Now, though, I see things differently. I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.”
It’s interesting to note that three of the ‘vehicles of information’ are experiencing rapid changes, perhaps unrivaled in any time in Human History: cultures all over the world are changing dramatically, the family has transformed itself mostly (e.g. trends towards being nuclear families and changing gender roles), and lot of ‘education’ gets obsolete pretty soon. With an explosion in the information available for consumption, the brain, being highly plastic, is adapting more rapidly than ever. How would our future minds look like?
Read the complete essay at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks#ixzz1EDHUdO00
No comments:
Post a Comment