Mary, thank you so much for that kind
introduction. I can't wait to meet myself. I'm very excited. Um...One thing you missed out there and I think we have to get these kind of
league tables in proportion. I felt I should mention it... was another thing where I scored quite well was most inspirational women. And I came in as number 14. And my mum was very proud of this, not least because Camilla Parker-Bowles as she was then, the now Duchess of Cornwall, she came in at number 30. So Mum thought this was (laughter) but, but, but the whole thing was put in
perspective because coming in much higher than me, at number 9, I was number
14, was Dolly Parton. So I think, I think one can't get too, as the Australians would say, "up oneself" about these kind of accolades. but thank you so much
nonetheless. So as you heard what I'm here wearing unashamedly the hat of the neuroscientist. And what I thought I'll do is talk roughly in three different parts. I'm assuming that although there are some medics and psychologists here, that
the vast majority of you are not card-carrying neuroscientists is that
right? Yeah? So what we'll do is have the fastest ever course in neuroscience for
the first part of the talk and then how given this newly-acquired knowledge that
you'll have by then of the brain and the mind, how we can evaluate some of the
issues that the digital technologies are posing, and because that will be quite
gloomy, please don't get depressed because the third part is going to be
some ideas about what we can do about it. So that's roughly the overview. And
what's wonderful about being here is having now this platform, with so many
people here, to feel that we are all, I think, thinking in the same way. And
here's Meryl Streep of course saying, "the greatest gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy." And one of the questions that the media asked me just now was why is it important? Why should it be such a big deal? Well just imagine a world without it. Imagine not having empathy. And I think really we don't have
to argue the case, especially here, as to why this is central to human civilization, humankind, and our well-being. So let's start then by
thinking about what it means to be human and why it's so important that we do empathize with each other. What do we mean when we talk about humans? Well, we occupy more ecological
niches than any other species on the planet. And it's not because we run fast,
we don't see particularly well, we're not particularly strong compared to many
others in the animal kingdom. But we do something superlatively.
Other animals do it to greater or lesser extent. The goldfish doesn't do it very well. And that is adapt to the environment. Now the poor old goldfish, let's be brutal, they don't have great personalities do they? And if you had a goldfish and it died
while your kids were at school you could sneak off and get another goldfish. Perhaps you've done this you know and they wouldn't do any difference. Whereas
you couldn't do that with pet cats or dogs. And much as they might want you to,
you certainly couldn't do it with their brothers or sisters. And that is because
as we progress in evolution so we escape, increasingly, the tyranny of genes. We
escape the tyranny of instincts, such as characterizes the repertoire of the
goldfish, and you become more and more interactive and vulnerable and, at the
same time, sensitive to the power of the environment. And human beings do this superlatively more than any other species, we adapt to the environment. So
you probably don't recognize me in this picture but there I am in the middle. And
I'm sure you could show similar pictures. What shaped you? What made you so
different from everyone else? It's not your heart or your lungs or your liver.
What is it about humans that means that we are so individual? We have these
individual experiences that make us individuals. So even if you're a clone, that's to say, an identical twin, you are unique. And no one will ever be like you
ever again. No one will have a mind like yours, a consciousness like yours ever
again. And for the hundred thousand years we've stalked this planet, there's never
been anyone like you nor would there ever be again. And I put it to you it's
that that we have to preserve. That's what matters to human beings. It's their identity and their uniqueness that makes them so special. So how do we therefore go from that to this? Now sorry if you've just had breakfast and this puts you off, but um I'm afraid if you ask a neuroscientist to speak this is what happens -
they show you a picture, sooner or later, they'll show you a picture
the brain. And the reason I like this picture is because it takes me back a
long time ago now from when I was an undergraduate at Oxford and we had to
dissect a human brain. I know there's some medics here so I'm sure you've had
a similar experience. Because the brains come in plastic buckets and they're immersed in formalin, which is a fixative that obviously preserves them which is
toxic and pungent you're wearing surgical gloves, as in this picture. I
remember the first day this happened and they brought in these sort of Tupperware
buckets in there and you roll your sleeves up - can you imagine this? And you're wearing gloves but you plunge your hand in and then you just hold this brain in
one hand just like this. A bit like something out of Hamlet actually. You
hold this yeah you hold it just in one hand, and you think: that's the essence of a
person. And how do you get from the amazing impossibility of trying to
understand, as we've just heard, you know what makes a person. How does it boil
down to this? This thing that I could get under my fingernails. Because I was
thinking if I wasn't wearing gloves and a bit dislodged under my fingernail
would that be the bit that somebody loved with you know? Can you have an
emotion under your fingernail? Yeah? Or could you have a memory under your
fingernail going to the seaside with Auntie Flo under your fingernail? Or could you have a had bit like biting your fingernail under your
fingernail? And I think, no, seriously this is what keeps us awake at night, we
neuroscientists. Yeah it's a big issue! Yeah because
that's all you've got. And it's very uncooperative, the brain, there's no
there's no visits, not like the heart or the lungs, there's no it's not mechanical
there's no clear moving parts about it. And yet somehow the challenge is to say
how do we get from that to this? This rich diversity that we pride ourselves on that we are. Well, if you like, that we would call "the mind." And I like to
distinguish the brain from the mind. Some philosophers look down on people such as myself. They think we deal in the squalor of the chemistry of the brain and
they're dealing with the aloof airy-fairy things of the mind. What I
want to show you is that that's a misconception and that we we
neuroscientists, with our squalid chemistry, nonetheless can aspire to
thinking about the mind, but we relate it to the physical brain. And I'll show you
how I think we can do that. So how do we develop a mind? Well forgive forgive me, the technical people that are here, I'm going to talk in lay terms. The blobby bits known to the specialists as neurons or brain cells, and you can see here when
you're first born you have a fair complement of the blobby bits, namely
brain cells, but very rapidly, as the brain grows post natally, the growth of the
brain is caused by the proliferation not of the blobby bits of the brain cells
but of the connections between them. And if you remember anything remember that. It is these connections that are all important. Why? Because even if you are a
clone, that is to say an identical twin, with the same genes,
you are going to have nonetheless a unique configuration of brain cell
connections. Because because you're human and not a goldfish, these connections are
going to be forged and strengthened and updated and constantly regulated by your
personal interaction with the environment that no one else shares or has.
This is something called plasticity. It doesn't mean to say that the brain is
made of plastic of course. It comes from the Greek "plastikos" - to be molded. So
this is the essence I'm going to persuade you, these connections are all
important and we know that plasticity operates throughout life for example in
this series of paintings by a gentleman who had had a stroke - and it was a stroke
characterized by neglect of half his body. And he was an artist and when he
was asked to paint himself he only painted half a face because that's all
he recognized as his. But within nine months, you can see by the time we get to bottom right, he's painting himself fully again. And I'm sure you're familiar and
perhaps know personally people who've had strokes and had partial recovery or
complete functional recovery following a stroke. That's plasticity at work. It's the brain working hard to compensate for what's been damaged, as well as during development. But you don't have to
have a stroke for plasticity to be at work. Your everyday life, even as an adult,
can leave its mark literally on your brain. And this is a wonderful example of
London taxi drivers - it's a very famous study this. It was done a while ago but
it's a classic and you'll see why because of this. Now those of you who
have been to London will think this is probably a very unusual picture because
the cab driver is actually smiling, which they never do - especially if you mention the words Boris Johnson or Brexit, you'll find that you know you don't have to
keep up your end of the conversation. very much, they'll do all the talking.
It's also quite unusual because the passenger is smiling - so clearly this was
a faked fake picture but anyway. So the reason I'm showing you these are the black cab drivers, I don't know about here in Toronto, but in in England for a
black cab they have to pass a test called "The Knowledge," where for about two
years they have to learn by heart all the streets of London all the one-way
systems so that, without recourse to a manual, when they come to have their oral
exam - it's a very punishing exam - the examiner says how would you take me from
A to B and they have to recite off every single street, every one direction and so
on. I don't know, what are Toronto taxi drivers like? They'd be the control
group probably would they? They'd be the control. Okay so well, certainly in
Melbourne if ever you go there, they would certainly be the control group.
Anyway. So in this ingenious study what they did was to scan the brains of
London taxi drivers because they have this phenomenal memory that they had
learned. And lo and behold they found that an area of the brain called the
hippocampus shown here and you can see the back of the brain is that orange
cauliflower-y thing and the front of the brain is on the left. What they found
that the hippocampus was actually bigger in London taxi drivers than in people of
the same age. And it wasn't having a big hippocampus that predisposed you to
being a London taxi driver. Because the difference was more marked for the longer
that they had been driving. Now this fact is not lost on the London taxi drivers -
if you can get a word in edgeways over Brexit, if you're ever in London and take
a black cab, ask them if they know what the hippocampus is and they all do -
they're very proud of this. Yeah. So this is an example of the more you use
something the more it will prosper and strengthen. And this example of
plasticity, of how people of all ages adapt to the environment is now there's
lots of examples. So we can look at various studies on experts such as
London taxi drivers you can see musicians, mathematicians,
basketball players, so it can be both mental and physical activities' prowess
that will leave its mark literally on your brain. Golfers. Don't know if anyone plays
golf but you can see it's gratifying for them. They have larger grey matter
volumes in certain areas. Now, you don't just have to be an expert,
you can be a normal person. That's not to say of course that golfers aren't normal,
in that regard or otherwise, and so as well as studying people that have
sustained activity that has caused physical changes in their brain, you can
also look at people like you and I who are recruited to do experiments and then
asked to do something like juggling for reasons that defeat me, but anyway, you
can then see that even within seven days you see structural changes in the brain when you ask people to learn certain tasks. Similarly exam preparation and learning a language all leads to physical and
measurable peer-reviewed reports of changes. So I don't have to belabour the
point, I think people are very familiar now with the notion of plasticity and
suffice it to say that for human beings it's your evolutionary birthright that
you will adapt to the environment in whatever you do. And it all happens by
the connection between one brain cell and another, the so-called synapse. I'm
sure everyone has heard of that and the little chemical messengers that are
released from one cell onto another across this gap that causes everything
that you are. And it all happens therefore through the connections
between your brain cells. Okay so if that's the case, how does it really work? Now in order to understand that we have to leave taxi drivers and golf players
and for a moment look at rats. And we have to do that because we're now going to delve deep into the brain and look at physical changes at the level of brain cell connections. Now you can't ask a rat to
play golf or drive a cab, or obviously you can, but not going to get you far, so what you
have to do is manipulate the environment of the rat to see if you can manipulate
corresponding changes. And this experiment is actually from my own lab
this picture I'm about to show you because my graduate students had a
lovely time contriving what's called an enriched environment. Now enrichment for
a rat doesn't mean to say they come to the Globe and Mail Centre and have
hopefully an interactive, exciting, stimulating session. This is the equivalent for a rat of what you're doing now. Here they are - having a
lovely time. So my graduate students built this environment for the rat where
they're highly interactive creatures as you can see look how about happy they
look because they know they're not in the control group.
They've drawn the long straw as it were. Compared to their counterparts in the ordinary old home cages. And what you can do - so
about three weeks only you keep the rats in this kind of rat heaven, and then you
compare it with rats who weren't quite so lucky in being allocated into groups
who were in the ordinary, humane, but somewhat under stimulated, home cages. And
then you can look at a single brain cell from each animal in a way that you
wouldn't in humans. And what I'm going to show you now is just that. So here you
can see a single brain cell from an animal in the so called standard
environment. And this may be unfamiliar to you but I'd like you to focus on the
branches coming out of the blobby bit. The blobby bit is the main part of the
cell but I want you to draw your attention and concentrate on the
branches and compare it with a brain cell from an animal from the enriched
group and you can see, I hope, that there is a difference. So even after three
weeks, even for a rat, putting them in environment with little wheels and
chains or whatever they had, swings and so on, and interacting with each other,
you can see the difference. Now why is this interesting or important? Well, just as with muscle, I'm sure you're familiar with the notion of "use it or lose it" and
the more you exercise muscle, the stronger, more effective it becomes, and
if, for some reason, you can't use your muscle - like when my brother broke his
ankle we were astonished at how quickly his calf muscle atrophied, because it
wasn't being used. So use it or lose it. And it's similar with brain cells.
The more you make brain cells work hard, the more they will respond. But they
don't just grow. What they grow are these branches. Now why would they want to do
that? Well, by growing branches, you are increasing the surface area of the cell.
And by increasing the surface area physically and literally you are now
providing more space to facilitate more connections - because now more brain cells
can hook up with you because there's more target, there's more space to do
that. So just to repeat, a stimulating, interactive environment, whether it's
taxi drivers or golfers or rats in a stimulated enriched environment, if you
are making the brain work in a certain way and stimulating it, it will respond
by growing more branches which in turn will enable it to make more connections.
Why is that important? Let's go back to humans. I want to
suggest to you the connections in the brain give an ever deeper meaning over time.
What do I mean by that? Well, let's think of something like this. When you're a
small baby if you are shown this or an infant it won't mean anything.
This object won't mean anything. But it may be attractive because it's golden,
shiny. You might want to roll it. You might try and put it in your mouth. It
could have an appeal because of its sensory properties alone.
But as the weeks turn to months, gradually because you're a human you
will obey your evolutionary mandate and you will develop connections that are
reflecting the experience with this object, so you will learn, because that's
what human beings do, you will learn this is something that goes on fingers. You
might learn the name eventually - it's a ring. And you might then learn as you
continue, that a gold, shiny ring only goes on a certain finger, and it only
goes on a certain finger under certain circumstances. So you will learn that if
you see someone with one of these, it says something about the person. It means
something that is not at all apparent from the sensory properties alone. Okay,
then you might acquire one of your own when you've grown up. And now this might
be the most important thing to you - irrespective of its monetary value or the
fact is pretty generic in its appearance that particular object might be the most
important thing to you. And then, sadly, as can happen, it might go from the
honeymoon to the divorce and now it's the thing that evokes the most bitter
memories, the most negative thoughts, the most complex associations. And all of
this from an object a kid would just put in its mouth. What has changed? Not the
object, but the connections up here. what has happened is you've been liberated
from evaluating the world in purely sensory terms - to what we call cognitive
from the Latin cogito: I think. So now as you are developing as a human being, you
are shifting to evaluating people and objects and events in terms of their
cognitive sense, not raw sensation. It's now the cognitive importance that you're
putting on it. You are allocating a personalized meaning that is not
apparent from the objects alone. Now, there's also another way in which
connections can help you - in case you don't recognize
this, this is a ghost, British ghost. That's what we all look that yeah it's
bad hair days what we wear when we're wearing these yeah. Now had I come on
dressed like this today, I don't think anyone here, I hope no one here, would
have been particularly frightened. You might have had other reactions and
thoughts, but you certainly wouldn't have been frightened. Whereas a small child
would be frightened. And indeed someone with dementia also would be frightened.
And that, incidentally is what my company is on, and if...I won't talk about it now,
but if you want to contact me and talk about our research on dementia I'd be
delighted to do so. Now just as we've seen, as you are developing, you are
curating these wonderful connections that are personalized to you, that give
you a personalized meaning on the world, so sadly with dementia, you are going in
a reverse direction. And the patient with dementia gradually, as they are
dismantled, as those connections dismantle, so, slowly, the world means
less and less and slowly they change to being more and more like a child and
then an infant where you are forced to evaluate the world by the sensory input
alone. And you don't have the advantage, as we all do, of the checks and balances
provided by the cognitive basis, the cognitive connectivity, the conceptual
framework, that you've been curating over your life. So someone with dementia, very
sadly, becomes like a small child again. And in both cases, if all you've
got is the senses and you don't have any checks and balances and something, such
as this, is novel, of course it is potentially life-threatening. And of
course you'll be frightened by it. So that is why, sadly, we fear dementia.
Because what you are losing is the essence of your individuality. You are
literally losing your mind: de-mentia. So it shows you how connections are
important, not because they enable your own personal evaluation of the
world, but they free you up from literally taking things at face value.
They free you up from that so that you can have your own personal view of what
is going on. And that is why I am very skeptical when people talk about
computers because in a sense we need to be mindful of the difference between so-called
fluid versus crystalline intelligence. As you can see here rather depressingly
this fluid intelligence, so-called, peaks when we are very young and is on the
decline. Now fluid intelligence is rather like that of
a computer. That is to say to give the right responses to answers. Whereas, as
you mature, and you know, reassuringly, unless you are the victim of Alzheimer's
disease or some other disease - and it is a disease of older age it's not a
natural consequence of aging - if you mature normally, then the more you age, so
you have more of an intensive conceptual framework, which means your
understanding becomes deeper and deeper - hence wisdom. And that is what we would
call knowledge. So you can see that there's automatically a difference
between what one might think of as mere mere information processing versus
deeper understanding or knowledge. I think that's emphasized very nicely -
when they tried to get a computer to translate metaphors - and it's just sort
of sidetrack on this - so if you ask the computer to translate or what does it
mean the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, the computer comes up with the
vodka is good but the steak is lousy. It's taking it literally you see? And you
know there's inability to appreciate metaphors. Or here: out of sight out of
mind is invisible insanity. So you can see now why there's many fears of AI, but
I'm, but very few of the fears are raised by neuroscientists. It's usually by people of
the physical sciences or very rich billionaires like Elon Musk. It's never
neuroscientists who fear, because we know there is a huge difference. And indeed
there's something called the Turing test developed by the great Alan Turing - where
the test would be if you were given impartial access to a person and a
computer and you could ask any question you liked and you received answers in a
form that didn't tell you which was which, a computer would be deemed to be
conscious, would be deemed to have passed the Turing test, if you couldn't
distinguish between the computer and the person. And as yet there is no artificial
device or computer or robot that has passed the Turing test.
Very amusingly there there is however one or two human beings that failed it.
I'm sure you all know you may know people like that yeah. So here we have
this poor robot here trying to become a human. Okay, so the issue is then with
facts that that is not the same as understanding. And you may be familiar
with Charles Dickens - the Thomas Gradgrind: 'What I want his facts. Teach
these boys that there was nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted...' I'd like to say that what connections do is enable you to escape
from facts. Facts on their own are very boring. And what we want to do is, if you
have information, you want to join up the dots so that you have knowledge. So
that is part of what humans do - we're exploring what humans do - and that robots to
the best of my knowledge fail to do. And I have no optimism that they'll ever
achieve it. Moreover, we can escape just mere computational processing as you can
see here, as well as our central nervous system that is hooked up to our immune
system and the endocrine system all of which contributes to giving you the
consciousness and the views you are. There's a lovely quote from Niels Bohr
the physicist in the 1920s. He said to a student, 'You're not thinking. You're just
being logical.' Which I think is what people forget about. It's a nice quote
yeah. And you might wonder what this has do with empathy, but I'm trying to
explore first, in this fast course in neuroscience, why the human brain is
special and different and why we do different from computers and then
echoing Einstein about knowledge: 'Information is not knowledge. The only
source of knowledge is experience.' That is to say: living your life, having your
brain cells stimulated, and joining up the dots in such a way that you see the
world in a unique way. Okay. So here you are living your life - this is downtown
Oxford - that's how people think we all live I think still yeah. And everyone in
this picture is like everyone in this room. We all - although we're in the
present - your current present is informed by your past. And as I'm talking, I bet
everyone here has a unique and very different interpretation and reaction to
what I'm saying and doing right now. So although you are in the present, it's
a kind of extended present that is informed by the past. And it's probably
planning the future or will inform your future. And it's this beginning,
middle, and end - which I'm going to come back to again and again because I think
that sequence of a beginning, a middle, and an end is very important about being
an adult human being. Because it's this beginning, a middle, and end that echoes
in a story, it's your life story, let's hope the end is way into the future, and
I'm going to argue it's the essence of thought. That it has a beginning, a middle,
and an end. But that more anon. Suffice it to say that your identity - your identity -
is this: it's your unique passage in time and space going in one direction. And the
more you are living your life, the more it is informing your present, and the
more it's making you unique. The more experiences you have, the more individual
experiences you have, the more individual you become. And that's what I
think makes you the special person you are. And it's all down to the connections
in your brain cells of which you have about 100,000 connections on any one
cell. So in answer to the philosophers whose sneer at people like me, I would
like to say that the biological basis of the mind is the personalization of the
physical brain - so you can distinguish it - but through the unique
dynamic configurations of the neural connections that are in turn driven by
your unique experiences. OK. So that's the end of the course. As neuroscientists now hopefully you're armed to now explore the next
possibility which is: what is the impact of this new world? If you accept that, yes,
that we are intimately in dialogue all the time with the environment, but it's not
just that we are inviolate and processing as though it's not making any
difference to us, what's going on, every time your interacting with the
environment it is shaping and changing you. And it's this constant dialogue that is so fascinating and has so much potential, but so much problems attached
to it, especially when we think about this new era. So let's think about this
new era, and I think that's summed up very well by comparing the election of the
Pope here in 2005 to 2013. Look at the difference. Yeah, even within just eight
years you can see the difference in the number of cell phones, mobiles as
we call them in the UK. And then you know you can think about what you see every day
which are these kind of things. I'm showing these commonplace pictures to you simply because they are commonplace. In 1999 would we would we have seen
pictures like this or thought about this? Now it's a way of life. I'm particularly
interested by bottom right which was a phase a while ago. I don't know if it's still done called planking. Yeah and what you do is you spend your time on this planet
by lying flat in a line and looking at other people doing that on YouTube. And
that's how people think. I'd love to know why that is interesting
you know to do, but I think it's endemic where we are in society. So I don't think
I need to argue too long or hard that the 21st century environment is
unprecedented, by just merely showing these pictures. Now of particular
relevance here is that we, in this room, are all what would be called digital
immigrants, that's to say we have already because we are of sufficient stage in our
life, although I appreciate some people are younger or older than others,
nonetheless we've all led lives with real memories, real friends, real
experiences, so that, to a greater or lesser extent, we'll embrace the digital
world but it will always be to embellish our real world. Whereas nowadays for a
child born now, you have this kind of thing. So if you want to spend fifteen
hundred pounds you can on a, here you are, a cot with a screen in it. Or here. As you
may be aware the American Pediatric Academy have said no child should have
screen exposure under the age of two. I think parents think the kid looks
clever by playing with a screen like that. Perhaps most alarming of all is
this - if you have shares in Fisher-Price. So from the very start, you have these
very immature brains - leave aside the cognitive impact and the deprivation of
real interaction, but simply having to cope with an excessive amount of blue
light, which for the immature visual system is a real strain. So even leaving
aside that and then this, this is in case you need to buy a present for someone,
this is a bed for your phone. Okay? It's as though your phone is a person
and you know you can put your phone to bed. Because it's so important
to you otherwise it's the only way to get the kid... Yeah I mean it would be funny if
it wasn't so sad. And routine in the press now, we can see here on Daily Telegraph last August endless statistics. What was this one?
Yeah a fifth of 16 to 25s spend more than 7 hours a day online. The government
imposing screen limits. I think now there's a wake up call. When I first wrote Mind Change in 2014 and preceding that when I've been talking about it for
the previous five years I got a lot of pushback and hostility. And now I feel,
very sadly, vindicated because there are endless stories and reports and thoughts
about this so we don't have to go into it too much. Now some might say, and they
did, that I should be joining the Amish. I hope there's no Amish
here. But there's always people like me that have stopped technology. There was
the Luddites. I'm sure you're familiar with the movement in the UK in the
Industrial Revolution who wanted to smash up the machines because they
didn't like technology. So is it technophobia that I'm suggesting? Or are we living, as I would suggest, in an unprecedented world. Let's just think about it. People do cite the printing press, or the car, or the television,
saying look these are all technological advances and people shook their heads
and clucked their tongues, and you know were disparaging about those things and yet
they enriched our lives. That's precisely the point. These inventions enrich the
real life but those inventions didn't stop people eating together, which they
always did, shopping face to face, playing games with each other,
certainly dating face to face and working face to face. So although one had
these technological inventions, they supplemented your real life they didn't
supplant your real life. And now, all those things, as you can see, can be substituted with the screen. So you can get up, you can go to work, you can go dating, you can go shopping, you can play games, all without meeting another human
being. And how can this not - how can this not impact on how you see the world, on
how you interact with people? Given we've seen how adaptable the human brain is. This was highlighted a while ago in the Daily Telegraph when 200 of us signed a
letter, an open letter about the erosion of childhood. This is not about free lip
gloss and eyeliner. It's more that it was the front page. And you only have to
compare pictures like this (unclear) (unclear) kids in the 1980s whereas
kids in the 2010s. You can see a difference. Similarly, I couldn't resist
this picture of my friend's grandson obviously having a lovely time just
being outside and exercising and taking fresh air and it put me in mind
anecdotally of another email I had from a father in Australia. 'Last weekend I had
an eye-opening moment when the children had been lazing around the house using
and fighting over technology. When finally I was able to coerce them out
for a short walk, we actually took bikes. And I watched them with delight - the
laughter and fun the kids had riding up and down this particular steepish
dog leg's bend - the enjoyment, laughter and giggles from one's children is truly
music to the ears of a parent. I do not ever hear that laughter
when they're using technology.' And although that's not a peer-reviewed
paper, I think sometimes a quote like that really just captures it. And then
just to add insult to injury, it turns out that the Silicon Valley Titans are
not sending their children to conventional schools that have iPads, but
guess what? They're saying them to schools that are technology free. So I
think that tells you something and then this is another quote: 'Today more than
three billion people tote a tiny supercomputer that has turned them in
the words of this guy Michael X and Smith is the creator of this app into
dopamine frazzled zombies.' We're coming onto what dopamine is in a minute. And
similarly, the founder Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of the web, he said
'Humanity is connected now by technology is functioning in this dystopian way. We
have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarization, fake news there are lots of
ways in which it is broken.' He says we should have a Magna Carta for the web,
that's his latest thing. Okay, so if we take all that together as you've heard I'm
suggesting this is comparable to climate change. But whereas climate change I
think has damage (unclear), the little I understand about it, nonetheless
with mind change it's in our hands to do something about it. Hence this rather
contrived image of hands in both cases it's unprecedented. In both cases its
global. It's controversial. And it's multifaceted. And what I mean by that
it's not a simple problem: Are computers good or bad? Rather like
with climate change, there's many subproblems and issues to unpack. So it
is with mind change, and hence this shameless plug for my book which was
published in 2014 which it sets out in a less garbled way. This is an informatic on
screen time which I just thought I'd include here. In particular, the bottom
right one - 73% of people believe the use of electronic devices has contributed to
stress in their life, 81% admit to interrupting conversation, meal time, or
playing with family or friends to check their social media. 61% of people
have felt jealous, depressed, and sad or annoyed, after checking updates. How can
this be helpful in the way we interact with each other? So let's now look in a little bit more detail at some of the issues that I'd like to flag very
quickly. One is attention span. And this is peer-reviewed papers on attention span. Whenever you see the flash, these are peer-reviewed papers. And because of
time obviously I don't have time to go into them, but I
would commend them to you. It might come as no surprise that there is a
shortening of attention span. Addiction which is something that clearly parents are worried about - are screens addictive? Well this is a very good review by dr. Sigmund a year or so ago, which summarizes it. As you can see here,
he's talking about screen dependency disorders. And again from the
Herald-Sun in Australia, a doctor from McGill University as well working with
people at Monash, showing poor decision-making skills and volatile
withdrawal symptoms were among the most common traits shared between groups. Said the worrying trend: 'Social media use continues to grow with many individuals
displaying anxious and even conflicted behaviours when attempting to withdraw.' So I think people are now starting to acknowledge screen dependency as a
genuine disorder and indeed the World Health Organization have recently now
named it as a clinical disorder: Internet Gaming Disorder. And we were talking just
now about how one would define that and you can see here a list, which I won't
rattle through with time, but including withdrawal, tolerance, and all the features that we characterize clinically with addiction. Okay. So how is it happening then? Well this is again brain scans and the yellow dots show errors of
micro structural abnormality from people with internet addiction gaming. So we
know these things are changing. How is it happening? Okay. So again the Telegraph
which is a very right-wing paper in the UK. I'm not a particular advocate of the
Telegraph, it's just they do publish some good science stories sometimes. And this
one was about children who love video games have brains like gamblers. And what
they drew attention to was this yellow blob at the centre of the brain at the
bottom which was enlarged in kids who were playing video games a lot, and
resembled that seen also with gaming addiction. Now it turns out that that
area of the brain releases a chemical, which I've mentioned already, that you'll
all have heard of, in excess. And this chemical underlies excitement, underlies
addiction. All drugs of addiction, irrespective of their target, will
release this chemical. And it underlies reward. In case you haven't had one,
that's a reward recently. Biscuits. And you've probably heard of it,
it's called dopamine. Everyone's heard of dopamine. Now, dopamine's a very hard-working transmitter,
chemical messenger in the brain. It does lots of things, but I just want to draw
attention to one particular action it has that underlies the issues we're
looking at. And that's that it inhibits an important part of the brain called
the prefrontal cortex. Now this part of the brain is a very sophisticated part of
the brain. It's biggest in us humans. We have 33 percent of our cortex is that
whereas only 70 percent of chimps. Now what's really interesting is what
happens when it is inhibited or damaged or under functioning. You see a certain
syndrome and that syndrome was first described by someone called Harlow in
the 1860s when someone called Phineas Gage actually had a terrible accident
when he was tamping down explosive while laying a railway line. And it drove
this rod through his prefrontal cortex damaging it. And this is, there he is,
sorry if this puts you off your breakfast. Anyway so here is what Harlow
said in 1868, "He's fitful, irreverant, indulging at
times in profanity, manifesting little deference, impatient of restraint or
advice..." The crucial question is that here "he was a child in his intellectual
capacity." Now we know that the prefrontal cortex is only fully mature in late
teenage years, early 20s. And in that sense it's a good example of individual
development reflecting evolution. What people used to rather pompously say
ontogeny reflects phylogeny. And that's an example of this. So this prefrontal cortex is very late to develop, in any event. And you can see it here
shown in turquoise. And I'd like to suggest that this gives us another
feature that we should be studying which is excessive recklessness. Because in
children, as you can see here, it's only, as I mentioned, mature properly when
you're in your early twenties. And here on the right you can say that although
intellectual ability sharply arises in early teen years there's a great lag
behind in what's called psychosocial maturity - that's to say attention spans
and taking risks and so on. Now there's another group of people also
who have an under functioning prefrontal cortex, that display similar traits of
recklessness. And they're shown here. Now these people, people with high body mass
index, and this is a peer-reviewed paper, have a less active prefrontal cortex and similarly, people with a high body mass
index are much more reckless in gambling tasks. Another group, this will all come
together in a moment bear with me, are schizophrenics who, again, also have
an under functioning prefrontal cortex. And schizophrenics, if you like, are like
children - this is a very complex situation, schizophrenia and obviously I just
want to draw attention to the parallels with childhood, not go into all the
nuances of schizophrenia, but the comparisons are that both are easily
distracted, both have short attention spans, neither can interpret proverbs. If you say to a schizophrenic, 'What does it mean
people who live in glass houses mustn't throw stones?' They'll say, 'If your house
is made of glass and I throw a stone, your house will break.' Which is, of course, true.
But it's that literal sense, rather like we saw with the computer about the steak
and the vodka. It's a failure to draw connections. And both have under
functioning prefrontal cortex. Now what does this all have in common with gaming and high BMI and schizophrenia? Well, anyone who eats, knows the consequence of eating. But the thrill of the food for some overrides the consequences you're going
to pile on the calories. And anyone who gambles knows the consequence of gambling, but for many addictive gamblers it is the role of the roulette - roll of
the dice or the spin of the roulette wheel, or horse past the finishing post,
that actually makes you very excited and that is what is addictive and compelling.
And in schizophrenia, if you look at top left everyone would recognize it as a
cat. Bottom right no one would recognize that as a cat. But that could
be a clue. Could it be that in all these scenarios, rather as we see prompted by
paintings by the schizophrenic, that we've gone there from cognitive to
sensory? Could it be that when you have excessive dopamine and/or an under working
prefrontal cortex, that actually you are going back to having raw sensation? And
that raw sensation overrides the consequences, it overrides the cognitive.
Now life has been ever thus with human beings. We've always liked wine, women and song. Drugs and sex and rock and roll. In all those cases you are abnegating a
sense of self. What you do, is you either take alcohol or drugs that impair the
connectivity of the chemical messengers between your connections so they're not
working so well, or you put yourself in environment that is stripped of
cognitive content where actually have raw sensation driving everything. Now
this was recognized by Euripides. This is from the Bacchae, which was written in
about 500 BC or just after. And here you can see this poor King Pentheus, in the
middle, who's about to be torn apart by these wine-crazed women. Look at them,
they're worshipping the wine god Dionysus. You see how wine crazed they
look. So even then it was acknowledged, and the play is all about the balance
needed in life between the cognitive and the sensory. The prefrontal cortex
working and it being under active. Not that Euripides said that. But we do talk,
do we not, about having a 'sensational' time? If I said, "oh, let's go out now and have
a cognitive time." Who's going to come? No one. Yeah, bad luck you're having a cognitive time now. And we talk about letting yourself go, blowing your mind, losing your mind. The word 'ecstasy'
comes from the great 'extasis' - to stand outside of yourself. So although
you're conscious, this carefully curated mind with its past, present and future,
these carefully curated connections, now they are no longer accessible. They're
temporally suspended in favor of the press of the moment, the thrill of the
moment, as shown here, and indeed here where from Australia people wanted to be,
they were paying money to be totally out of control. So we can think of
two basic modes for the human brain: One is the meaningless and the other is
the meaningful - where the prefrontal cortex under functions as opposed to
being active. Here strong feelings versus thought, the sensory versus cognitive,
living in the here and now versus the past, the present, and the future, external
stimuli driving your consciousness. So my little brother, for example, is much
younger than me. He who I used to torture mercilessly. When I knocked the ice cream
out of his hand you know and he'd cry you could just say look at the birdy
and suddenly the tears would stop. Whereas if you have a cheerful adult you
can't say look at the birdie they're not going to thank you for that. So there you
have this internal narrative that is so special to us. Here the world has little
meaning - think of the wedding ring. Here we have personalized meaning - think of
the wedding ring. Here there is a reduced sense of self and here there is a strong
sense of identity that I was saying is cultivated as we live our lives. Here
there is no time-space reference. If you have damaged the prefrontal cortex you
can have something called source amnesia, which means that you have
generic memories but not memories for particular episodes in time and space.
Here we have a clear time-space frame of reference, a narrative of past, present,
future, beginning, middle, and end. This is mainly infants and children. This is mainly
adults. Kids in the early teenage years have the biggest surge of dopamine
they'll ever have, whereas we have less. So you can see that, on the one hand,
you've got excessive dopamine and in any way an immature prefrontal cortex and
those two together would give you the profile you're seeing on the left. So far
so good. But now, with gaming, I think that balance is skewed. So here you have
intense stimulation of the screen which mandates a fast response. So you're very
excited because you've got dopamine released, and that underlies reward
seeking behavior which is addictive, that then inhibits the prefrontal cortex,
bringing about scenarios such as childhood schizophrenia and obesity, and
that is characterized by a drive for sensation rather than cognition. Where
are you going to find that most? Where are you going to satisfy that drive? From the screen. And so around you go. And that, I suggest, is a model for addiction. Okay so then moving on. Just to drill down now and this is a very good paper by this one
Jean Twenge, you may have heard of. Which actually addresses the issue raised by
many critics which is what is the proof? And of course in brain science it's hard
to tease out correlation from causality. But this is a very thorough study where
she looked over time at different ages. And you can see here the amount of
hours a day in screen use with different ages - how there's a deterioration for the
longer the screen use has been going on, a direct correlation. Again here, so not
remaining calm are not finishing tasks you can see there's a clear trend for
all age groups, that if they're using it for more than a few hours a day that
that is going to deteriorate. So that suggests there is a world now driven by
external stimulation. A world where, instead of your inner beginning, past,
future, your identity, you are dependent on things coming from the outside world -
the high arousal of the outside, probably the super stimulation that a screen
provides. Now a worrying indication of that trend comes from a paper published
in the high-impact journal Science recently, where they simply asked
millennials to sit still for 10 to 15 minutes. Very cheap experiment by the way,
just ask them to do that. And this is what they found.
So here we are. This is, that's the reference. So (reading aloud) "In 11 studies we found that
participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in the room by
themselves with nothing to do but think. They enjoyed doing mundane activities
much more." And this is the killer bit. "Many preferred to administer electric shocks to
themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts." So my case rests. Why would you want to do that? If you had
a rich inner world, why would you want to do that? Most people seem to prefer doing
something rather than nothing, even if the something is negative. So we see
this kind of picture. One day I'm going to show this and the guy's going to be a
professor on the front row I'm sure. But you see a world where there's no
cognitive content, where you'll engage in activities characterized by strong
stimulation rather than individual cognitive meaning. And where the
time frame is much shorter, so you do not have time to develop your own thoughts, to
join up the dots in your own way. Next thing: Is aggression - and again there's
arguments about whether this encourages aggressive behavior. It's not so much
that people go out and kill each other. It's not so much violence, but you do get
an aggressive, adversarial mindset. And you can see here that the brain, the
reason is the brain is habituating to violent stimuli, as shown on the
left, in a way that it's not on the right. Then we come to, perhaps most important
of all for this conference, to reduced interpersonal skills. Now these
gentlemen, even in a business context, are acting in a way that we would applaud.
They're looking each other in the eye, they are touching each other and
probably the words are incidental. And indeed, we know that words have only ten
percent of total impact when you first meet someone. Eye contact, body language,
voice, and pheromones, those sneaky chemicals. That, you know you say, I just didn't get
on with them. I don't know why. I just didn't hit it off. And physical contact,
even here, even in a non social scenario all are really important for
establishing interpersonal communication. And yet none are available on Facebook. Okay. So if you are not us, who had all those things already, but if you are a young person born in this century, when are you going to
rehearse those other skills? When are you going to rehearse it? And you're only
going to be good at what you rehearse. So of course it's going to be aversive,
because you won't be used to doing it. Which means you'll carry on
still doing the screen time communication. And you see this kind of
thing all too often. This is not an advert for Pepsi, by the way, it's just
that how often do we see this - these kids who are not talking to each other, who
are not interacting with each other, not looking each other in the eye. This has
led somewhat controversially to people seeing parallels with autism, and, in fact,
the phrase has been coined virtual autism, which is different. Virtual autism
as its name suggests has been that if you spend a lot of time in front of the
screen and you're very young then you're not going to be very efficient at
interpersonal skills. And that's shown here. There's some articles here. By the
way you're very welcome to this talk afterwards if you want it. You're you're very welcome. I'm sure Mary would distribute the talk for
anyone who wants it yeah very happy to have it. Now the good news is it's
reversible. I repeat the good news it's reversible. And what this study did in
the General Computers in Human Behavior is they actually took a group of
preteens and for half of them confiscated their mobile devices and
sent them to summer camp for five days, just five days. And they found that, guess
what, are we surprised that the kids that were in summer camp for five days
already has significant improvement in their nonverbal emotional cues and in
their empathy and their interaction. And we're not surprised are we at this. I
mean perhaps what's surprising it only took five days to achieve. So that leads
on then to identity. And I think that's really of the essence of what we've been
talking about. And what I fear is that we're going to now have a fragile
identity. If people are constantly downloading and sharing and are
dependent on external input rather than having a rich inner world, what is that
going to say about how they see themselves? And what would that lead to>
Just look at this history of blogging. I quite like this. So went back to '99. (reading aloud) "I have to tell someone about this thing my cat did today. 2004 OMG! Cat pictures! YouTube, you know what's coming obviously,
2005 moving cat pictures, and that pinnacle of civilization so beloved
south-of-the-border by the head of state, 2007 1:00 p.m. my cat just sneezed, 1:02 cat sneezed again,1:04 cat hasn't sneezed recently, getting worried. (laughter) Yeah and my (unclear) these people, they're in existential crisis you know. Why do you
need constant feedback you know. I mean, I work with a lot of Millennials people in
their twenties and they're always taking photos of their breakfasts or their food, the most boring things... Why should anyone, what does it say?
Does that mean you're insecure in who you are? You need feedback.
Yes that's exciting or that's good, my breakfast was the same as your breakfast.
My breakfast is better yeah - what - why? It just seems a very strange, very
strange pattern and something we should think about. So this something about social
networking what is it? Okay so let's think about that. No one likes to be
lonely. None of us like loneliness. Okay. So it's bad for your health. We know that
it compromises the immune system if you're lonely. And so what we love to do
is share personal information. It makes us feel good. It's in evolutionary
reasons for doing that otherwise we'd never procreate. Of course it makes you
feel good. There's a lovely study, I think it was Harvard, where - but it's in
my book Mind Change it's referenced there, but it's a proper study - where they gave
subjects that done well the opportunity either to have monetary reward for their
task or the alternative was actually slightly strange it was the opportunity
to talk about themselves. And most of them chose to talk about themselves
rather than take money. Yeah. So, as I say, next time someone comes to you for a pay
rise, say well sorry, no dice, but you can talk about yourself for half an hour. And
hopefully that'll do it for you. Social networking sites we know
release dopamine, which we've seen, makes you feel good, but this time there is - now this is a really important point - body language is
there for a reason. It's the handbrake that nature puts on,
against, to offset the natural tendency we have to talk about ourselves. So in
normal interpersonal relationship, you won't confide in someone, you won't obey
your desire to talk about yourself, if they're shaking their head, their arms are
folded, they're averting their eyes and they're leaning away from you. You -
that will be the handbrake. Similarly, they might get bored with you talking
about yourself on and on. They'll want to say something as well, so that offsets
things as well. So, in face-to-face interaction, you can see how one can offset - contain the natural desire we have to talk about ourselves by protecting you at the same time from trading off your privacy
and being vulnerable to bullying. And what happens then, and sadly we know
that's on the increase, is, in retaliation, what people do is conflate an artificial
sense of who they are. They will fabricate a new life that's not the real
you at all. So this, of course, will appease your audience of 500 so-called
friends, they're not really friends, they're really an audience. And that,
hopefully, will get you all these friends and all this approval. But the real you
will be lonely. The real you is atrophying. So who is this real you? And I think that is another danger that we are facing when we're thinking about
social networking. So you can see here, this is recently. This is really
depressing. It came out in the UK last year, a fifth of young people disagree
with the statements that they find life really worth living. I mean what a
terrible indictment. And there we are... 18% and then up to 60% - I find it difficult not to compare my life to
others. 57% "social media creates an overwhelming pressure to succeed.
I feel more anxious about my future when seeing the lives of friends online. 48% And
those of us who grow up without social media and would never have made
statements like that because it would have been impossible. And many say that
it is indeed bad for the health. This is people from Facebook. So this guy Chamath
Palihapitiya, I can't pronounce his name, but he actually worked for Facebook and he said
quite, I think, articulately, 'the short-term dopamine feedback loops we're
creating are destroying how society works.' And then Sean Parker, who was a founder
of Facebook, 'It literally changes your relationship with society with each other. It probably interferes with productivity
and weird ways. God knows what it's doing to our children's brains. Now if people
who work for Facebook are saying that, should we not be concerned? Okay.
This is a study done a while ago now by the British government, and for
those people that like pie charts and histograms, it bristles with lots of
statistics about the decline in identity, partly attributable to the increase in
relation. You can download it from the screen. So what do we do about identity
and what do we know about identity? And how we can help
people have a secure sense of who they are? Well we love to be assured that we
have a particular identity. We like to impress it on others. And this goes back
a long time to the nephew of Freud, a guy called Bernays who was in advertising in
the 1920s, as you can see from the picture. And he was tasked with getting young women to smoke in an era when they didn't. And in a time when people didn't
realize the perils of smoking. And so what he did to persuade young women to
smoke, was get attractive young women to be seen holding cigarettes. And he didn't
just say oh smoking's nice or something. No, he said this is the torch of freedom.
It will stand for something. It will say something about you. It will say
something about you. Now that's something that advertising
has really hooked onto. Some of you may remember Betty Crocker cakes, I'm sure
they were here as they were in the UK. They weren't selling very well, the
instant cake mix, until they came up with the genius idea that they would ask the
person themselves, the user, to add their own egg. And by adding an egg you were
adding your individuality. I know it's sad, isn't it. No but it's true! It's true.
People felt they were expressing themselves by adding an egg. Yeah I know
it's funny. So we know that there's always been an appeal for products that
say something about you or help you express your individuality in that way.
And if you google the slogan 'as individual as you are' all manner of
things come up. Look at this. All these things will make you more individual, in
case you wondered. The problem is that you find that you have a kitchen,
or whatever, and then your neighbor has, they're more individual, and you have this
arms race you know for individuality. So it's not really a very good strategy
for becoming an individual, by buying things. A more recent strategy, and I
don't know, I hope I don't offend anyone in this room, but it does fascinate me -
which is the rise and rise of tattoos. Now tattoos have been around forever. And
yet only in the last what 5 or 10 years have they become mainstream. Now
why is that? What does that tell us? Could it be that in a world that is highly
transient, where everything is shared, where you have no clear boundary, no
clear sense of who you are because every thought, every moment is tweeted or
photographed or shared, a tattoo, a tattoo is permanent by definition. And it's on
your skin and therefore it's yours. And echoing that notion, is this quote from this woman Zara Barrie: 'My tattoos remind me of who I am when I start to feel my identity getting blurred
in the thick of life.' How many people here would say they get their, I know who I am,
and I'm sure you do, you don't need tattoos to remind you who you are. 'They
root me when I start to lose myself. They're about memorializing something so
important it has to be engraved on my skin.' And similarly, Johnny Depp: 'My body is my...my
tattoos are my story.' Notice 'story.' So I think this is a really interesting trend,
and I'll just leave it as interesting without a value judgment, that people
feel that they need to embrace something that is permanent in this way. Does that
say something about how they are seen and how they perceive themselves in the
real world? What could we do about it? Well I think a better way of having an
identity, rather than adding an egg to a cake mix, or lighting up a cigarette, or
having a tattoo, is this: When you're a kid is to develop a real inner narrative,
of which I've been talking. And do you remember when you're a child, do you remember that
exciting invitation, 'let's make up a game.' Let's make up a game. And this box is a
castle, no it's not it's a rocket, no it's not, it's a racing car. Do you remember that
excitement of, anything was possible! And with minimal props. You could go
outside and a stick would be a sword and and...if you needed anything at all. And
why that is so important, in my view, is that what you're rehearsing there is a
life story. It's a story. Things happen. There's a narrative. You have a
beginning, a middle, an end to your little game that you're playing. And what it's
doing is actually giving you a strong inner narrative that's perhaps prompted
by things like a box from the outside but it's not driven by it,
whereas if you compare that with these poor little kids sitting in front of a
screen, driven by someone else's imagination, where they give them fixed
menus and options, where all they can do is with their fingers manipulate it, skim
things through. What a difference from having a world where anything, where you
can be in a spaceship, you can be in a car and it can suddenly change, and you
can be anything you want to be and you're rehearsing a story and but you're
in control. It's coming from you. It's coming from
inside. Would that not give you a strong sense of confidence and identity, that,
sadly, is at jeopardy now by someone constantly being on the receiving end of
sensory stimulation all the time. Echoing our idea, this is another one. It's poor critical thought. These are from two veteran school teachers, on the right, Matt
Miles and Joe Clement who are based in Washington DC. I would urge you to read
this book which I've endorsed on the front. They, like lots of teachers, have
had the benefit of looking at different generations and how things are changing.
And they actually contacted me because they were so concerned. You yourselves
might like to hook up with them. They would love it because they feel that
they're fighting a losing battle against a government that imposes iPads in
classrooms and so on. They are really great guys. They've been teaching for
several decades and they've just written this book, which I would endorse you to
hook up with them. And on the left, you can see from Davos, just the spread of
information is like a digital wildfire. But, as we've seen, information is not
knowledge. And if you say, well, if you say well, what is honor? If you Google honour, a
very nuanced and subtle thing - if you do it in the UK the Queen comes up
immediately of course, but then you get these. Now if you show these to a
Martian or a small child, would they understand what honor was? No they wouldn't. It's a bit like, also, when you go
straight on the screen and you compare say this video princess with Princess
Marya in War and Peace. They're both fictional princesses, but I bet you feel
differently about them. I bet you don't care about the princess in the video
game, but you do care about Princess Marya, otherwise you wouldn't be turning
the pages of the book. And so, they're both fictional, but why do you care more
about Princess Marya? It's because she's like you. She's got a life story like you.
She has relationships like you. And by having association, she therefore has a
significance, and a meaning, think of the wedding ring, like you. And, therefore, you
keep turning the pages because it's a beginning, a middle, and an end in the
future - it's a life story. Whereas the princess in the video game is literally
meaningless. She's just there. She doesn't have any connections. There's someone who
agrees here. 'I worry that the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information is
in fact affecting cognition. It's affecting deeper thinking. I still
believe sitting down and reading a book is the best way to learn something. And
this person says he's worried we're losing that. And this is the person. And he's the chairman of Google, or was. So, if the chairman of Google is concerned
about this, then surely we are legitimate in our concerns also. While we're looking
at quotes, if you go back 50 years even, the writer Isaac
Asimov was very prescient. Back in 1964 he predicted what life would be like in 2014. Look what he said. It's really good. So he
was predicting life. He said, 'Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the
disease of boredom...the lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort
will be the true leader of mankind,' but get this, for they alone will do more
than serve the machine.' And he said that fifty years ago. So what kind of mindset
are we looking at of the future? Well, we've seen a short attention span,
sensation at a premium, addictive personality, recklessness, low on empathy,
poor interpersonal skills, a weak sense of identity, perhaps good at information
processing, but looking at icons not abstract ideas, and therefore poor
critical thought. So instead of being like a computer, as some people fear, I
don't think we're going to be like computers this next generation, but
perhaps worse, like volatile three-year-olds, permanently stuck in a
world where they have this weak sense of identity, everything is self referential,
poor communication skills, and highly needy. How can we combat that? Okay, so I
think if you accept my premise that we need to help people escape from the
press of the moment and from the impact of raw senses, and give them back
something cognitive, surely what we need to start to do is to generate an
individual life story. And to remind them of their life story. So as we've seen,
you're living in the present, but you have a past, and a future. So you need to
span both the past and the future by being aware, as I say, of an extended
present, not just of the present. Now how can you do that? Well we know the brain
adapts to things, and that's why multitasking, which some people applaud, I
think, as you can see how on the right, is actually very poor for the brain. What we
need to do is, instead of having simultaneous things, we need to have
things that impose a sequence, that have that linearity, that give you the time
frame. Now one example is playing music. And this is a lovely study by three
groups of adult human volunteers, none of whom could play the piano. If you ever
get the chance to volunteer for a study like this, a word of advice:
try not be in the control group because they stared at a piano for five days. And
this is what happened. You can see on the left to right, this blob, the brain is literally unimpressed. Nothing's happened. But, if
you compare that with the second group who were actually were taught five finger piano
exercises, you can see here that there's an astonishing change in the activation
of the brain territory, even after five days. This is an example, again, of
plasticity, bit like with the juggling. But the most exciting group were the third
group. And these people were merely asked to imagine they were playing the piano.
Okay? And look at them. So what does that tell you? It tells you as far as the brain is
concerned, it's not the actual contraction of the muscle, it's the
thought that precedes it. I'll repeat. It's the thought that precedes it. Which
makes us, then, come back to reflecting on what is a thought, different from
an emotion. When you have an emotion, you scream, you cry, you laugh, as a baby will
do, as animals do. But a thought is not necessarily seen in very small children
and animals in the way it is with us. What's the difference? When you have a
thought, you end up in a different place than where you started, whether it's a
memory, or a hope, or a fear, or a lie. It doesn't really matter, a logical
argument, you've ended up in a different place. And how did you get to that
different place? By a sequence of steps. And the man who developed the treatment
for Parkinson's came up with his lovely quote of thinking. He said, 'It's movement
confined to the brain.' So thinking is movement confined to the
brain. Now in order to have the sequence of steps, you need a time frame because
it takes time to go from one to the other. And that's what I think
the sequence is enabling you to do. So anything with a sequence is enforcing
the thought process. So let's have a think about that, as it were. So, if you
accept either a logical argument or business...this is Bubba Yaga, the
wicked Russian witch. So when I was in my kindergarten the teacher
read these stories. She had metal teeth and ate the heads off children. And
I used to plague my little brother with stories of Baba Yaga. I'd see him
in tears. Very gratifying... That's not a thing to say to people in
empathy, sorry. He's got his own stories to tell of this. But nonethless, I still remember
the stories of Baba Yaga. So stories actually enforce thought because the
whole thing, the feature, the common feature, is a sentence, or a story, or a
life story, is the same as a thought, which it all has a sequence going in one
direction. As does sport. So physical exercise we
know is good for you, because, you can see here, actually
encourages something called neurogenesis, which is the production of new neurons.
And again, a quote from Nietzsche, from a long time ago, 'All truly great thoughts
are conceived while walking.' Now, we know that exercise is good but perhaps here
you haven't realized, even in the adult, physical activity, you can see here, is one
of the drivers, shown in green here, offsetting stress and aging, for
encouraging the production of neurons. Similarly, in school-aged children we
know that physical activity is correlated positively with academic
performance, as you can see here, both mathematical developments and region
development is positively correlated with aerobic capacity - of
more oxygen going. And then for those of us who are older, even we don't get off the
hook. You can see here exercise training, look at the ability it has to enhance our cognitive skills even as we're older. So it's a no-brainer really
to talk about how obviously good sport is, and physical activity is, but there's
other activities as well that I think impose rigid sequences, one is cooking.
You can't hurry a roast dinner. You can't reverse the order in which you proceed
with a recipe. You are forced to wait for periods of time and it has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. You can't reverse or jumble up the order. Similarly with eating,
you don't reverse or jumble up the order. Traditionally you start, guess what,
with the starter, end up with the pudding. And when you eat, that's when you are
actually interacting in the way that all anthropologists have acknowledged. The
very word 'copain', 'with bread.' Companheros, companion. By sharing a table, that's where it's much more than ingesting calories. You are actually
acting out a sequence. And similarly, on a longer scale, gardening. You don't, you
can't reverse the order in which a plant grows. And you have to wait certain times.
Now all these things might seem obvious but my own view is that these are very
important parts of being human. And we neglect them at our peril. We know, while
we're on gardening, that physical interaction with nature, this was
comparing people in Ann Arbor with downtown Michigan, and they found that
that enhanced their cognitive skills when they were all scoring the same.
Half went to Ann Arbor Arboretum and the other went to downtown, and the ones that
were in the Arboretum benefitted. Now people have hooked onto that.
I'll bet you can't guess what this is. It's actually Microsoft's new offices. They've
realized the benefits of being outside. And finally, the obvious example of
sequencing action is reading. This is another shameless plug, this time for my
Mum. This is available on Amazon. And she was a dancer, as you can see, and that's
her on the right. She calls herself Dorice, that was her
stage name. Her real name is Doris which is bit work-a-day, but she thought Dorice
sounded fancy. So she's Dorice. And there she is, she's
changed a bit now, she's 92. But she wrote this when she was 89, 90. And I applaud
her for that. But the whole point is that reading provides a temporal framework, it
gives you a meaning, and we've seen meaning comes from joining up the dots,
enhances your attention span, and you know when you read a book, the characters
are so real, which is why I always say the book is better than the film, always.
Always say that. Now why is that? It's because your imagination is something
very special. And it's something that doesn't come when you're very little, but
it only comes by rehearsal, of being read to, and reading, that you develop that
rich inner world, which is what I'm plugging. It's that rich inner world that
is both your sanctuary and your identity. And that, I feel, is endangered by the
current lifestyle. And this lovely quote, 'Imagination should be used not to escape
reality, but to create it. Isn't that nice? And it provides the temporal sequence
thinking, which we've seen is movement confined to the brain. So the takeaways
then would be for doing this: physical exercise, interaction with nature, cooking,
eating together, gardening, music, stories. Now, these things are not
expensive or bizarre activities, they're very straightforward things that I
feel should be counterbalanced with the digital activities that, of course, we all do.
There's this lovely quote from Ben MacIntyre about stories. 'From the moment
we become aware of others, we demand to be told stories that allow us to make
sense of the world, to inhabit the mind of someone else. In old age, we tell
stories to make small museums of memory. It matters not whether the stories are
true or imaginary. The narrative whether oral or written, is a staple of every
culture the world over. But stories demand time and concentration...' (notice time)
'the narrative does not simply transmit information, but invites the reader or
less to witness sound folding events.' And I
thought of particular relevance here, you inhabit the mind of someone else. That's
what reading does and helps establish empathy. So vision for the 21st century
then would be that, first of all, we need to put a premium on identity. Not on how
many Facebook friends we've had, not on your tattoos, but on your private, inner
world that is curated by you and you alone. You respect, and have therefore,
individuality, that's the most important thing. And by promoting individuality
you will then promote empathy, which is what we are after all gathered in this
room to discuss. And you're very welcome to this talk. If, on reflection, you want
to talk to me then these are my emails the first one is the general one, the
second is on our work on Alzheimer's, if you're interested. And thank you very
much for your attention. Thank you.
