One is the loneliest number, the extended brain
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Natasha Mitchell
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One is the loneliest number
That you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one
– Harry Nilsson
Don't kid yourself. Your mind and its contents, memories and neuroses, creative impulses and curiosities, are not your own. From birth, there's a merger going on that rivals the efforts of any great mogul, and your self is just one component of this cyborgian enterprise. Your cognitive scaffolding is as much social and technological, as it is of the flesh. Reach out and touch the world, and you're rummaging among the crevices of your mind.
But where does this strange possibility leave one's individual autonomy and the boundaries of the self – you and me, us and them? To explore the impressive scope of recent thinking about our networked mind, consider first the history pages of psychology and the roots of our unconscious mind.
In the deepest folds of slumber, what sense can we make of the novel occupants of our dream world? When we dream, read a fairytale or go to the cinema, do we repeatedly encounter universal themes and characters? Psychologist Carl Jung famously thought so, and saw a connection between the figures in our dream stories and those in our popular mythologies and stories. These are his so-called archetypal symbols, among them the Shadow Figure, the Hero Figure, the Anima and the Great Mother. Together they occupy what Jung controversially coined the Collective Unconscious that, he proposed, unites the contents of our individual psyches.
Though Jung's tenuous idea infuriates many, its possibilities still intrigue and remain threaded through the fibres of popular culture in film, prose and the visual arts. Perhaps its enduring seduction is that it helps us feel less lonely in moments of solitude, offering us the prospect of a virtual community of the mind. After all, implicit in Jung's theory is the belief that at some level we are all cognitively connected in some way, that the "persona is a collective phenomenon".
TODAY, MOST SCIENTISTS VIEW THE POSSIBILITY of a collective unconscious as esoteric hocus-pocus – mystic madness even – impossible to measure and too woolly to embrace. And who can blame them?
Nevertheless, the notion of a networked, connected self appears to be finding a new, more material footing, as metaphors of the mind merge with 21st-century science and technology. "Connectionism" has become all the rage – from studies in artificial life, neural networks to chaos theory, self-organisation, complexity and cognitive modelling. These are just a handful of the mind-expanding fields embracing the idea that there is more than the power of one.
Swarms of bees, colonies of ants, stock markets and high-rises of humans – all social communities – are now considered to have an emergent intelligence, even a global consciousness of sorts. As a thriving, writhing mass, might they possess a combined acumen beyond the stupidity of any stray bee, ant or human? It sketches an apocalyptic vision that would have had writer John Wyndham, author of The Triffids and other great sci-fi classics, itching with fictional possibilities. "Attack of the Brilliant Bees" – Hollywood, here we come.
In another vein, the push for "connectionism" is an interesting development, because ideas that espouse a more global version of reality have long been hotly disputed in science, even seen as a fundamental challenge of the postmodern variety to its rational enterprise.
Recall the contentious Gaia hypothesis, proposed by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock in the early 1970s. The Earth, Lovelock hypothesised, is a self-regulating, self-equilibrating living organism in and of itself – more than just home to a vast and diverse population of discrete yet interconnected organisms, systems and species. His idea is still embraced by some environmental and spiritual thinkers but has fallen out of favour among mainstream scientists who are entirely sceptical of the implications of such a grandiose vision.
"The Gaia hypothesis attracted the most attention from theologians interested in the possibility that the Earth controlled its environment on purpose, from those looking for ‘oneness' in nature, and from those defending polluting industries, for whom the Gaia hypothesis provided a convenient excuse whereby some collective set of natural processes would largely offset any potential damages from human disturbance to earth systems," wrote Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston in their book Scientists on Gaia (MIT Press, 1991).
THERE ARE MANY, AND MORE ACCEPTABLE, EXAMPLES of "big" ideas that have historically received a cool reception in scientific circles. The search for physical or "neural" correlates of human consciousness is one of them (though that's rapidly becoming a mainstream effort now); and Galileo's original challenge to the medieval cosmos could be considered another.
Engineering and science have traditionally relied on reductive thinking to get on with their core enterprise of problem-solving. This capacity is both a commendable strength – it provides an essential and practical focus – and a weakness. Putting the blinkers on can mean missing the bigger picture, possibly the most important questions and, frequently, the interconnectedness of things. As we well know, the latter can have disturbing consequences and has been the basis for much of the criticism of the tech-fix approach. Technological solutions can create as many unforeseen problems (Chernobyl, thalidomide, industrial displacement) as they solve (nuclear medical technologies, cancer treatments, workplace safety).
My experience as an engineering undergraduate in the early 1990s firmly cemented this problem in my mind. Four years of grappling with fluid mechanics and differential equations, sitting in enclosed laboratory classes and producing single-number solutions to simplistic questions just didn't strike me as sufficient. How was I ever to negotiate the full breadth and might of the human-industrial complex, with all its predicaments of policy, risk, history and social need? Admittedly, that's not the job of any single engineer, or novice undergraduate for that matter, but the bigger connections and context were absent and that deeply frustrated me.
MORE RECENTLY, THOUGH, ESPECIALLY AMONG THE MIND and computer sciences, scientists and philosophers have become bravely expansive and are thinking in terms of networks rather than discrete systems or individual components. "There is a path between any two neurons in our brain, between any two companies in the world, between any two chemicals in our body. Nothing is excluded from this highly interconnected web of life," suggests physicist and writer Albert-László Barabási in his book Linked: The New Science of Networks (Perseus, 2002).
Take the intricate cobweb of white and grey matter that we call our brain. When the new brain-imaging technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) really took off, neuroscientists were falling over each other to find the neurological hotspots for autism, for appetite, musical talent, love, fear, for sexuality and schizophrenia. Every imaginable human trait, emotion and disorder was put under the pinhole scrutiny of these tools.
To some extent that chase is still on, though today, thankfully, there is a deeper understanding that the brain is a much more sophisticated beast, with its different components wired together through vast and complex networks of more than 100 billion neurons. It's a work in progress but the brain is now also understood to be more plastic, continually evolving as we learn, live and grow. If a stroke from a blood clot or head injury does damage to one area, this can often be slowly accommodated by other parts of the brain, as neural networks adapt and rewire to take up the slack.
This back-pedalling from the basic is occurring in genetic studies, too. Deterministic deliberations about a possible gay gene, an obesity gene, a gene for psychopathy, though they make for revved-up newspaper headlines, have given way to a more subtle appreciation of complex multiple gene-environment interactions that together define the moveable feast that is the human condition.