The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
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complexity – until we arrived at contemporary tools. These interact almost exclusively with our minds and shape our nervous system.
In a famous experiment by University College London in 2008, researchers used magnetic scanners to read the brain activity of twenty taxi drivers while they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London’s streets. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, they obtained detailed brain images as taxi drivers delivered customers to their destinations.
Different brain regions were activated as they were planning their routes, spotting familiar landmarks, or thinking about their customers. Brain areas were activated and grew by building information needed to find the right way around complicated London streets. Earlier studies found that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus – an area of the brain important in navigational abilities – than most of us.
Technology “Does” Us
Technologies which interact primarily with our minds have an immediate effect on our neurophysiology. For example, research using fMRI on 18 to 26 year olds who average 14 hours a week of violent video showed activation of the amygdala. This almond-shaped structure of the brain in the temporal region is considered part of the limbic system in which our instinctual emotional reactions take place, including modulations of our reactions to threats.
Other experiments demonstrated that only five days of searching with Google by computer-naïve subjects were enough to change their neural circuits, activating in particular the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – which has an important role in our short-term memory and in the integration of sensory and mnemonic information. Whether we use IT interacting with our minds, or mechanical tools interacting mainly with our bodies, both affect our body-mind – even in permanent ways.
The main body movements required for hi-tech tools are in our hands and fingers with the mouse, the keyboard, or a touch screen. Research by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, 2009) found that hand gestures activate the same brain region as language (the inferior frontal and posterior temporal areas), something which any gesticulating Italian will easily confirm.
Ritual gestures of the hands have always been connected with the activation of inner states of the mind. The mudras of Hinduism are a path of spiritual gestures formed by the hands and fingers. Ancient disciplines such as the tea ceremony or t’ai-chi involve gestures connected to inner development.
The strongest neural connections are between the hand and the brain. Handwriting itself, with its subtle and highly personalized movements, can even give a glimpse of our personality through graphology. What happens when we use technologies which interact almost exclusively with our minds with no or minimal involvement of the body (apart from the obvious cardiovascular and obesity risks in sitting for a long time in front of a screen)?
Is the activation of certain areas of the brain the whole story about the potential of human evolution? Could it be that our cognitive capacities reside as much in every organ and cell of our body – perhaps even beyond our body – as in our brain and nervous system? Consciousness itself cannot be inferred by neuroimaging, much less can we locate wisdom or ethics in the brain.
If London’s taxi drivers developed a part of the brain according to their navigational experience, what happens when we rely only on GPS for our navigation? One of my acquaintances drove his car from the south to the north of Italy. When I asked which route he took and whether he passed one town or another I named, he answered that he had not noticed because he just followed GPS indications. Is there a possibility the same brain areas which develop in taxi drivers can atrophy if they are not used? Even more worrying are studies about the development of frontal lobes of kids.
Technology is a Matter of Life and Death
Our attachment to, fascination with, and need for tools has ancient roots. Human beings, unlike other species, do not have a natural specialization which allows them to live in a specific ecological zone. We would have become extinct a long time ago if we did not operate technologically on the environment.
Technology – in the form of fire, hunting tools, or hardware to fix a plow or a tractor – is essential for survival. Mechanical tools involve the whole body, spatial imagination, attention, and concentration to operate them safely. The capacity to remember the characteristics of the territory, the operating modalities, and the location of the numerous tools is needed.
Even the most primitive populations require some tools to extend their power. For instance, humans can survive only in a narrow range of temperatures unless we provide shelter and clothes for ourselves. And very few environments were once without dangerous predators, so we have needed to provide safety – again, through tools.
We can understand why we are so attached to technology and to the power we get from it. It’s about survival. We are also hard-wired to attend to new visual stimuli, in order to discern potential threats. Attending to novel stimuli – which nowadays arrive as pixels changing on the screen – has been evolutionarily rewarded with a pleasurable dopamine shot.
Binary and Inner Duality
Technology has continued developing, bringing us to the contemporary digital technologies. The core of every computer and electronic gadget is made up of 0s and 1s, binary sequences which represent the world as encoded texts, images and videos. The inner structure of a tool reflects the ways it is used, just as the molecular structure of a material reflects its macro-features like density, texture and resistance.
Splitting, distinguishing, choosing, and repeating are the main modalities of the Boolean logic that is behind binary technology. In the computer programming languages used to develop software, one of the main logical structures is the “if-then-else” construct (“if A, then B; if else than A, then C”) that allows statements to operate on choices and dualities.
The dualistic binary modality of functioning is typical of the rational thinking mind – and the computer extends such cognitive modalities. The basic structures of the mind are also born through the first dualistic event, when a child begins to split pleasurable-good-love-warm-care sensations from unpleasurable-bad-fear-alone-hunger ones. The first mental concepts are born by splitting our experiences. The infant does not yet have any concept or way to understand what is happening around him, but he already has the capacity to perceive and sense.
Within the undifferentiated world of the infant, the first primitive dual mental structures form, closely tied to his physiology – as in feeling good or bad. Later, this dualistic attitude will create more sophisticated mental structures, like concepts and ideas with further refined differences.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the nature of the mind is understood as dualistic. Its job is to reinforce our separation from anything and anybody else. “That which possesses a sense of duality – which grasps or rejects something external – that is mind. Fundamentally, it is that which can associate with an ‘other’ – with any ‘something’ that is perceived as different from the perceiver. That is the definition of mind” (Trungpa, 1991, p. 23).
Our mind is not just a mechanical logic-oriented dualistic tool’ – we can feel emotions too. Though thinking and feeling are usually seen as different entities, mind, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, includes emotions and sensations. Even the most appealing feelings still pertain to the mind. Emotions support the workings of the mind. “Daydreaming and discursive thoughts are not enough,” Chogyam Trungpa explains. “Those alone would be too boring. The dualistic trick would wear too thin. So we tend to create waves of emotions which go up and down: passion, aggression, ignorance, pride – all kinds of emotions” (p. 23).
Emotions support the mind to keep at its separating dualistic task. Even the computer has evolved beyond a tool that merely encourages a dry, rational attitude for our minds. Now it feeds our emotions through music, videos, sex, and social connections.
Knowing through the Heart
The mind is the generally acknowledged organ of thoughts,