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This will come as no surprise to any of you but I am writing these words on a laptop computer. I am sitting at my desk at home but I could be in my office at work, or in a local coffee shop, or in a hotel lobbying Boston, or a hotel lobby in Mumbai, or the airport in Timbuktu. Most of the world is not at all surprised by this, but my twenty year-old self would have been writing with a pencil in a spiral notebook, misspelling twenty percent of the words.
In a few paragraphs I will cite some research done by Dr. Dietrich Stout, of Emory University, who is a neuro- anthropologist, a profession that did not exist ten years ago. I first read about his research in a magazine, but when I wanted to learn more I just clicked on a search engine and I was connected to 364,00 references to him in .53 seconds. I’m sure that none of this is surprising to any of you, but again, when I was in college, way back when the world was colder, the Celtics were champion every year and Bill Russell was paid $100,001 for the season, I may still have received a magazine describing Dr. Stouts’s work. But to learn more I would have had to go to the library and search through the stacks and hope to find the right anthropological journal among the hundreds of journals in the library. Now of course, here are thousands of journals, and almost all of them are accessible in .53 seconds, right here where I am sitting.
Clearly, my computer is a tool, a complex, electronic tool that is connected to a power source. One of the distinctive behaviors that have differentiated humans from other species is our ability to make tools. We are not the only species that can do this, but we have certainly taken this concept further by far than the crow who uses a stick or the orangutan that uses a rock. Birds can fly, but we have built planes. Whales can live under water for hours, people can stay under water for months. As far as we know there is no other species that uses calculus.
We have reached the level of tool development at which tools are totally interwoven into every aspect of our lives. It has become impossible for us to live the lives we do without them. We live in homes that are heated and cooled. We move from place to place in cars, boats, trains and planes. We use tractors to plant our food and huge harvesters to bring in in from the field. There are refrigerated trucks and planes that ship the food all over the world. We have drugs to kill harmful bacteria, and drugs to keep our hearts beating and drugs to relieve pain. Yes, there may be some people who try to live their lives “off the grid,” but it is impossible for them not to be affected by those whose lives are lived on the grid, even if it is just the negative effects of climate change and pollution.
This brings us to Dr. Stout’s work. He has been studying what happens to people’s brains when they learn to use tools. He is starting at the beginning. He is watching what happens to the brains of people when they learn to make and use the first tools that humanoids made 500,000 years ago, which was before our species, homo sapien, emerged. He has been teaching himself and many students how to make stone axes. He is using more sophisticated tools to watch the changes that occur in their brains as they learn. First he used FDG-PET, fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography, then he used an MRI , magnetic resonance imaging, to explore how learning to make tools improved the brains of our ancestors.
Dr. Stout and his colleagues have been able to show that learning a new skill, a skill that is difficult to learn and takes a great deal of practice, will produce changes in the brains of people of any age. These are the kinds of changes that once they are learned, give the person an adaptive advantage. The people who learned to make and use axes had a better chance of surviving than people who didn’t. These people also learned to show others whom they associated with, their tribe, how to make tools, and that gave the whole tribe an advantage, and so their society changed, along with their brains.
That is what is happening today. We are all learning to use new tools, and new tools are being invented and created at a much faster pace than they were 500,000 years ago. Obviously, the rate of change is much faster. We will not wait another few thousand years to turn an axe into a spear, or a car into a driverless car.
The speed of creation of new tools has been greatly amplified because we now build tools to build tools. In order to build new planes we first write software programs to write software to design the programs to build the planes. We have already built the computers to run the software. Our lives have become so involved with our tools that the most important skill a person needs to live well and prosper is to be able to control the tools. However, in many ways, it now often seems as if our tools have such a strong impact on our lives that they control us.
Our tools, especially the electronic ones, have greatly accelerated the speed of change, and this will continue to accelerate due to the changes it creates. The electronic tools we create help us make those tools faster, help us aggregate more data, which helps us find more patterns and create new algorithms, which shows us more options.. These options are communicated at an increasing speed to everyone and anyone who will make use of that information to create new tools.
If they have not already, these tools have changed the way almost everyone on earth lives their lives. Jobs have shifted all over the world because people who are in company headquarters in New York can know instantly what production is going on in China, how quickly the product can be shipped to Denmark, and how much money will be sent to the bank in London. Money itself is only an electronic blip on a screen, and can move at almost the speed of light.
This kind of instant, world wide communication has changed how people meet, learn about each other, and in many cases mate and start families. I have had several patients who have made friends with people thousands of miles apart, sometimes on other continents. Based on virtual communications they have decided they are in love and have left what they considered boring, unfulfilling lives to seek love and romance miles away.
Yes, several have been swindled and fooled and have returned broke and broken hearted. But I have seen several people who have found what they had hoped for, or at least enough of it to begin new lives. One woman left Massachusetts for Hawaii, another young woman had a young man come from Alabama, and another woman began a romance with a soldier who was in Iraq. He came home wounded, had his leg amputated and a prothesis put one, and then they got married.
All of this would have been very difficult before 2005, when Facebook began, and helped the world to keep in touch. There were dating sites earlier than that, Match began ten years earlier, but by 2005 a huge portions of the world was on the Internet. In 2007 the first iPhone was sold. The world, and our brains, have been changing rapidly ever since.
If learning the skill to make a stone axe changes the shape and connectivity of a person’s brain, what does learning to write computer code do to the brains of young, or old, coders? Is the shape of my eighteen month old my granddaughter’s brains altered as she learned to take my smart phone and push the right spots on the screen to find Elmo? If getting a ping on the corner of your field of vision every twenty seconds alerting you to some new bit of information, one of which may make you change the entire piece of work you’ve been doing for two weeks because this new piece of information says that three old pieces of information are now deemed questionable, what does that do to your brain? or blood pressure? your emotional stability?
The biggest impact of the rapid development of all of these electronic tools has been on our ability to expand our knowledge about who we are, how the world works , and even the universe that we live in. Since the beginning of the new millennium more has been discovered and learned in every field of science than had been known in the previous four thousand years. A research question that could never have been asked thirty years ago can now be answered in a week, sometimes in seconds. So much of wha I learned in college and graduate school is now considered obsolete, or just plain wrong because so much of it was based on speculation, or the best possible guess, when now we have very clear data.
It is often pointed out that the warehouse size computers that were used to guide the first moon landing did not have the computing power of an iPhone 5. If we use all the tools we now have we could solve almost all of the world’s problems such as hunger, climate change, water distribution and disease. The obstacles that remain are financial and political. We are still searching for tools to help interpersonal relationships, and then to get people to use them.
Many questions keep floating into my consciousness: Is this what we want? How can we choose? How can we adapt to these changes? What skills will be necessary to live and prosper in this new world? Who will possess those skills? What about all the rest of the people?
