The Future of Human Thought | Pat Scannell | TEDxAshburn

your brain is different now that you’ve

seen that one slide I mean physically

and literally different light has

entered your eyeballs pass through

neural networks in the middle of your

brain on to visual circuits of the back

of your brain and then back up to the

front of your brain where for the first

time it’s perceived as conscious thought

there it interacts with other neural

networks of memories emotion and

executive function all along the way the

neurons in these pathways that have been

activated because that one slide builds

slightly stronger and better connections

to each other because that one slide so

what happens to your brain with the 11

hours a day you generally spend with

technology if you’re the average

American you watch 5 hours a day of TV

you check your phone 200 times a day you

get lots of flash bulbs your car parks

itself your phone checks it counts your

steps you use your computer to work and

to connect with friends the devices

around you are increasingly connecting

you and your brain to the rest of the

world what is that doing to your brain

why do I care about this isn’t it

pointed out I like many of you been

responsible for creating a lot of this

technology first the internet then the

smartphone then the Internet of Things

and even today I’m hard at work on the

technologies that should shape the next

ten years and along the way I’ve had a

chance to work with a lot of really

amazing technology experts that most of

the big companies you’re aware of but I

found myself wondering recently when

every public space I go to features flat

screens at the wall on the wall and

people and trance by them and every stop

sign I come to people checking their

phones I ask these basic questions what

makes us want to engage with technology

the way that we do pretty basic question

right i also have daughters so a typical

situation you know is i’m trying to

figure out how to raise daughters in an

ever-changing technology world I’ll walk

in and see them doing their homework

great

but the TV is on the laptops are up in

there playing Minecraft and their

smartphones are next to them receiving

continual messages from their friends we

all know what to do right we’re good

parents turn the TV off go downstairs do

your homework and go outside and play

that’s what our parents told us we know

that that works but what if the world

they’re going to grow up in is different

than the world that we grow up in what

if the skills that they’re going to need

are different than the skills that we’re

going to need what’s the future that I’m

pushing them out into and what do I need

to be explaining to them so that’s what

I set out to do a three year journey of

reading hundreds of books to try and

understand not only where we’re at now

but where we’re trying to go I really

wanted to read the book that gave me the

answer but I couldn’t find it and the

reason why was because I started to find

that the questions I I was interested in

led to other questions I don’t know if

you’ve ever worked on a project like

this a good example is if you read about

books about texting while driving or

what the internet is doing to your brain

you’ll find experts that talk about

top-down and bottom-up attentional

networks the primacy of v1 and v2 visual

circuits in your brain dopamine

everybody wants to talk about dopamine

but then all of those authors will

pretty soon make a statement something

like and your brain is hardwired to XYZ

or you evolved to respond to a certain

stimuli in a certain way so I got

curious and I wanted to figure out where

that literature was so now we go from

modern psychology back to our paleo

ancestors fields called evolutionary

biology evolutionary psychology

completely different discipline

different different evidence different

theoretical models but when you read

through that eventually if you find that

those authors to make basic statements

to we inherited some of these skills

from our ancestors prior to these guys

like the great apes tool use cultural

intelligence the ability to work in

small groups and if you go back even

further you find that the primatologists

that i’ve spoken to all around the world

resort to basic animal behaviors the

fact that we grew up in predatory

environments in fact I’ll challenge you

to think about the trending technology

whether it’s Netflix trending now social

media or Facebook

if you look at what’s trending now it’s

not that much different than what I find

and drives animal behavior the 4 f’s we

know what those are feeding fighting

fleeing and fornicating right okay so I

went back to the past and I went back

through this literature what I’m going

to do is try and share with you in the

next few minutes a few of the insights

that I got out of a three-year journey

shaving you having to read all those

thousands of scholarly articles and my

boring 500 page book on the topic I hope

that you’ll find that there are some

insights from the past that are going to

inform the future but the first one is

that the idea of evolution is not a

simple one we do not think the way we do

because of some single factor this is

not opposable thumbs or as Nick likes to

say fire this is a complicated picture

we had writing which definitely changed

our brains we had the advent of

agriculture which changed evolution that

was only 40,000 years ago symbolic art

the ability to represent visual images

and transfer that to the world around us

as only 70,000 years ago large brains

large brains only co-evolved after we

had food that we could cook that

provided the calories for large brains

what we have is a steady progress of

evolutionary steps if you take any one

of those out of the puzzle we don’t end

up thinking like we do today that’s not

the inside I want to share with you I

went through this exhaustively and I

found 50 different factors and if you

took one of them out we wouldn’t think

the way we do today here’s what’s scary

and unless you go through modern

psychology evolutionary psychology

primatology and animal behavior I’d

argue you don’t see that everything has

changed in the last 100 years give you a

simple example with the Apple here in

the last 100 years most of the hundred

years ago the food that you ate crew

within 100 miles of you now I can go

into wegmans and i can buy stuff flown

in the day before from all over the

world this is a huge change if you

change the food available to a species

thousand years ago a million years ago

anywhere in the planet you can predict

changes in behavior and social structure

new

in and body adaptations this change is

huge it’s just one of dozens we used to

walk 100 years ago the primary mode is

walking a little bit of horseback riding

occasional car or train now I don’t know

if you can see the Segway pushing the

scooter but it was the best way I could

find to kind of imply that most the time

we drive now walking is so rare that we

count our steps right this is a big

change for the entire scope of the arc

of human evolution our tools were

physical we could debate about books as

a theoretical or symbolic but now no one

will debate that in the last 10 years

most of our tools are digital this has

huge implications it’s not about how we

move our body anymore it’s how we move

our eyes what we draw our attention to

and the adaptations that haven’t a

neurological level are different when

it’s all in our head and it’s all on a

screen versus physical for the entire

scope of human history we’ve lived in

small populations 150 or less to put

that in perspective up until two hundred

years ago most people lived in rural

settings but in the last 200 years we

went from five percent of people living

in cities to over seventy percent here

in America that’s a huge change in terms

of social structures and the

implications for that and then just last

one of these physical you know men have

grown three inches 30 pounds and have

gained 30 30 years of average life

expectancy in just the last few years

these are just five examples from dozens

of things that we’ve changed all at once

so what I want to know is the world that

my daughters are going to grow up and

going to be a little bit different than

the one that I grew up in I step back

and I go holy it’s going to be very

bipedalism the ability to walk on two

feet major change because it unlocked

the ability to use our hands as tools

that’s what most people will point to

it’s a simple story but what most people

don’t look at is the fact that

bipedalism arose during a peer to

climate change the earth had been

relatively stable for three or four

million years but then it began to

oscillate and it was at that point that

our early ancestors began to walk and

they were able to leave

behind hunting and gathering areas that

our quadrupedal four-legged ancestors

were in and find out new sources of food

and resources and mates but and this is

a greatly simplified graph the earth

started to gradually cool and went

through periods of climate change not

related to man that co-evolved at the

same time that we developed cooperative

hunting cooperative hunting seems like a

really simple thing but we’re one of the

few species on earth that does it this a

lot of things that have to go on in the

brain and the social structure to

support that then the earth started to

warm up again again this is a very

simplified model but in 5,000 years the

earth warmed by five degrees it was

during this period that the oceans rose

humans moved from our rich hunting

grounds near the coast up into the hills

they discovered a few grains and thus

became agriculture and civilizations

never been the same all because of

climate change 5,000 years five degrees

but between 1900 and 2100 the buttons

the earth is going to rise in

temperature 5 degrees this isn’t a

prediction on I’m not judging

anthropogenic climate change I’m saying

this is factual if you read back through

the actual temperature in 1900 now and

extrapolate that according to current

scientific trends 5 degrees so is the

world that my children are going to grow

up in wit end you with your greatly

extended lifespans are going to live in

going to be dramatically different than

the world from the past I think it will

be so we’ve talked enough about the past

let me tell you a little bit about the

emergent brain it’s the title the

writing project that I’m working on but

it’s also the model the emergent brain

is this three-part model the brain of

course and the body that houses the

brain that’s great it keeps it safe it

moves it around it feeds it it nourishes

it and that’s important because the

brain is an expensive tissue for the

body to support it takes twenty percent

of the energy that the body produces to

take care of the brain whether you’re

awake or asleep but I’ve Co adopted or

co-opted a term from a guy by the name

of Ben hustad called XO cortex to refer

to all the information around us to

which we are now outsourcing our brain

I used to laugh when I heard that most

people under 30 don’t know the phone

number to their significant other but

then I went and got cell phones for my

daughters and I don’t know their phone

number okay so we are taking basic

thought process in memories and storing

them in the cloud we don’t need to know

them anymore Siri how many cups in a

gallon when I practiced this speech the