August 2, 2023
Is culture driving us crazy—in a good way?
A Science Alert from late June of this year compared the chaotic patterns of the jet streams—the currents of air that wrap around our planet and affect weather—to a Van Gogh painting. They have become so chaotic as to be unrecognizable to climate scientists. “I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern,” the author of the study said.
Perhaps educators (and parents) could be added to the list of observers who see large-scale shifts in wave activity, but this time in the inner atmosphere: The brain. Neither brain waves nor quantum wave activity that underlies neural processes are well understood. But the argument can be made that, whatever drives the brain, the patterns are as unrecognizable as the jet stream. The brain is not acting ‘normally.’
The proof is as visible as patterns on weather radar. Over the past 20 years, the number of American children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increased by nearly 70%. In parts of the U.S., close to 1-in-5 children are now diagnosed with the condition. Adults are close behind. The fastest-growing market for ADHD medications is adult women.
This is not an article debating whether an ADHD diagnosis is a handy way to control unruly boys or an inevitable byproduct of an over-medicated society. That debate is alive and well, but I’ll leave that to others. Instead, I see ADHD as one of several indicators that the brain—just like the climate shift affecting the jet stream—might be changing in response to the environment.
The rise in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), now at 75,000,000 (or 1%) of the world’s population, is the next candidate. Like ADHD, ASD ‘interferes’ with normal brain function, with effects varying depending on where an individual fits on the autism spectrum. Most of the effects we view as negative. But a 21-year-old autistic ‘speedcuber’ just broke the record for solving Rubik’s Cube in 3.13 seconds—something that ‘normal’ brains can’t do. And in today’s world, speed matters.
The Speedcuber story brings to mind the other side of abnormalities: The proliferation of prodigies. Again, this might be a diagnostic issue, with global media enabling us to publicize a phenomenon that has always existed. But I’m struck by the Afro-Mexican girl with a higher IQ than Einstein and already a college graduate at age 11. Or the 14-year-old from Northern California who just entered Santa Clara University, en route to joining SpaceX, or the 9-year-old autistic girl from Mexico City with an IQ of 162, higher than Einstein or Stephen Hawking. Nearly a story a week appears of similar young people doing amazing thinking.
So, what in the world is going on with our brains? Neuroscientists attribute the deviations to a vague set of environmental, biological, and genetic factors, but that’s just guessing. This should not surprise us. The standard neuroscientific model of the brain has yet to reveal how we ‘think’ under normal circumstances, let alone abnormal times. Other than a mysterious act of God or spontaneous combustion, no explanation exists for consciousness. How an appreciation for Shakespeare or reverence for Nature arises from a complex neural network made of commonly-known biochemicals is still a mystery.
With that in mind, I’ll take a different tack: What if the ‘rewilding’ of the brain, as I termed it for this article, is the result of the interaction between culture and the brain? More to the point, what if a ‘wild and crazy’ culture has set us off on an evolutionary response to chaos, in search of an altered brain with an improved ability to multi-task, value novelty, engage in an overly dynamic environment, and respond to the out of the box life we lead?
This speculation doesn’t contradict science—at all. Many pediatricians are convinced that the rise in ADHD is fueled by our fast-paced, stressed-out, consumer-driven lifestyle, a conclusion lent credibility by the reported near absence of ADHD in populations such as the Amish in the U.S.
But I suggest a positive spin is possible. Since the current theme of Intrepid Ed News is meaning-making, asking whether the human brain may know what it’s doing is a reasonable question. It’s a dynamic organ, capable of contending with a shifting environment. But do the adaptations signal a different future? Where is the brain taking us? As the world evolves and humans keep pace, what new meaning to our lives might be revealed?
Asking these questions evokes a potentially deeper line of inquiry: Is our fundamental view of the brain correct? It’s seen as a wired, modular organ with complex circuitry. But over the past 20 years, neuroscientists have explored the possibility that the brain is a quantum organ, with wave-like properties that enable us to interact with our environment in more profound ways than we imagined. Explorations in cultural neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics point in this direction, to the extent that traditional evolutionary biology has been questioned.
Given the radical reinvention of life right now, science itself may need revision. Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves: Are children using their brains as a tool for positive evolution? That’s the topic for Part 2 of Rewilding the Brain.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Thom Markham for Intrepid Ed News.
