The Changing Brain
An Overview
Communication is central to what we are as humans, and there is a good deal of information that our brains have episodically evolved as we have invented new ways to pass information among ourselves.
In the history of hominids there have been four fundamental inventions that changed how we communicate: speech, writing, printing, and coding. Over the coming months we will look at each and at the science and stories around them. I should tell you at the outset that this newsletter comes from the research for a book on the topic, and, hopefully, much of what follows will reappear when that project is complete. First, let me summarize the four episodes.
The story of speech is perhaps the most difficult to tell since there is no written record of verbal communication’s origin. Estimates for the beginning of speech range from as little as 60,000 years ago to as much as 1.5 million. There is also a lively debate about whether speech was a gradually acquired skill or came from a sudden genetic alteration. There are clues to the answer in the brains of our closest hominin relatives such as chimpanzees and in the skulls and DNA of lost hominids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. We will look at all of that.
Writing, which began as pictograms around 2500 BCE and progressed to alphabets by 750 BCE, profoundly changed how society and human brains functioned. We will look at the earliest alphabetical documents—ancient Greek and the Old Testament for example—that were transcriptions of oral tradition that predated writing and carry fascinating clues about how pre-literate brains worked. In addition, the few surviving pre-literate languages function with only a few thousand words compared to modern English with well over a million and thousands of new ones added every year. Much can be learned from those cultures, and we will look at them as well.
Printing with movable type dates to 1454 and began the first real information explosion. More books were printed between 1454 and 1500 than had been copied by hand in the previous 1,000 years. The Gutenberg press alone printed over 300,000 copies of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses. By 1600, 250 European presses had turned out over 12 million books. The explosion led to libraries, many of which morphed into universities that trained and supported the likes of Newton, Smith, Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Madison. The auditory brain became secondary to the visual one, and educated men lost their ability to memorize prodigious amounts of information. On the positive side, printing made the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution possible. New medical science brought antisepsis, anesthesia, and antibiotics and human life span nearly tripled. Printing was also central to the catastrophic religious wars of the seventeenth century, world wars, genocides, nuclear weapons, and global warming.
The current information explosion began in the 1830s with the first binary code that could be transmitted electronically. That was followed in less than a century by wireless analog transmission of sound and pictures. Binary codes reappeared in the 1940s with computers and transistors. Arpanet linked computers in 1969, and Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. Now 8.6 trillion texts and 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are exchanged every day. It is estimated that 90 percent of all the information ever generated by humans was created in the last two years.
The human brain has over 100 billion neurons, more than half of which can change either their structure or their connections to meet new demands. It is hard to imagine that the brain of the current internet adept fifteen-year-old is not profoundly different from that of his sixty-year-old grandfather who grew up with a few radio stations and three television channels.
We are just on the cusp of a monumental change in how society and the human brain work, and, if history is any indication, there will be some very good results and some that may not be so good. We will look in some detail at what happened with the other changes in hopes of better understanding what we are embarking on in the current one.
Join me and have fun. And I will look forward to your comments, corrections, and additions to what is to come.