Best Kabuki Brush 2010

Man, beta and dizziness

The example of the technology seen as a "Pandora's box" is one of those analogies I was talking fascinating in a previous post. After triggering Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Bhopal and oil spills, we are wary of sorcerer's apprentices. More questions to consider the introduction of GMOs, nanotechnology and gene therapies without first bard of the "precautionary principle", a sort of mental condom against all risks in technology.

What bothers me with this image of "Pandora's box" is that it assumes technology to be completely foreign to ourselves. This is obviously the case if one thinks of a particular invention. But the scale of humanity, technology has so influenced the evolution our anatomy that it has become an integral part. GM, for example: since we have domesticated fire, our digestive system has changed so much that we do neither digest raw meat and most vegetables or if you do not cook. The kitchen is sort of became our first stomach.
The invention of tools and weapons has also influenced our morphology: Fortunately we do not count on our on our jaws and claws to hunt game! Livestock has also undoubtedly played our genome through natural selection as lactose tolerance-transmitted hereditarily- could be a genetic advantage. We're genetically partly the product of technology. I wonder if we could lose our body hair at this point if we had not standardized the use of clothing.

Our brain itself has built in part around technology. We usually imagine that learning literacy, numeracy or language corresponds to additional neuronal connections acquired in addition to those which would have developed anyway, just a blackboard on which is printed on knowledge or a hard drive that records new programs. But these images are so simple as misleading because such learning requires not only that but also adds that removes some acquired. Learning to read, for example, takes advantage of our mental abilities to quickly recognize basic forms. Mas this "neuronal recycling" as it is called Stanislas Dehaene has a drawback: we are programmed to consider an equivalent form and its mirror image. This is handy because it allows to recognize instantly a lion, since it comes from the right or the left. Note in passing that this ability to horizontally symmetrical has no equivalent in the vertical direction since it has difficulty in detecting such an anomaly on a face turned upside down. This is the famous "Thatcher effect" you'll realize returning the picture below (source: here )

This instinct to make the left and right equivalent explains why children often write "mirrored" at the beginning and have trouble distinguishing between b and d, between p and q. Learning to read and write requires them to unlearn equivalence between left and right. In other words learning to read transforms our mental structures at depth, adding some automation and eliminating others, so then we no longer see the world the same way. The same principle

remodeling mind is at work to learn the language. Contrary to popular belief, a very young child differs more subtle phonetic than an older child. Anne Christophe explains (in this conference ) that as children learn a language, they stop paying attention to extraneous phonemes in that language until they can not distinguish them. Learning a language is therefore both add and remove faculty in our brains. A language is certainly not what is called a "technological invention" but this process of neuronal recycling seems to work whenever we acquire a new faculty. It showed such an unexpected link between the resources used to calculate brain and those dedicated to the evaluation of distances. By studying the involuntary jerking of the eyes, Stanislas Dehaene has discovered that an addition our spatial attention shifts to the right , and a subtraction to the left a distance proportional to the quantities. It is therefore reasonable to think that whenever you learn a new skill (driving a car, skiing, repair an engine, play chess ...), it slightly modifies the internal organization of our brain and that this reorganization in turn influences our behavior, our ability to learn etc..

the scale of our biological evolution, technology has indeed contributed to our construction and neural genetics. Somehow, we are partly the result of our own biological inventions! An example of bootstrapping leads me to try to push this idea a step further. Dawkins (I like quite moderately elsewhere) compare living organisms vehicles of "selfish genes" which is the most successful broadcast in large numbers. Could not we similarly consider the human species as the incarnation of "technological progress", a sort of meme using us as convenient vehicle for deployment as possible? Of course, each company retains the freedom to waive or to control its technological innovations based on cultural or moral beliefs. But this free will only makes sense in the short term. The history suggests that the scale of several centuries, all technologies available to eventually deploy full power, just as gas molecules occupy all end up statistically by the space available to them regardless of the nature of the gas. We would like molecules of gas, both able to control our day but unable to resist the long a form of technological determinism. Sooner or later, all the necessary technological advances available to us, whatever the consequences. In this perspective, the man would be there more than a mere artifact of the technology?

Related posts:
How we read on the neurons of reading
Neurons numbers: those on ... the calculation.