the neural investment and the battle of the brain

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THE NEURAL INVESTMENT

Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions — our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of man and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly. All this cannot — and does not — leave us unchanged. It accelerates the rate at which the individual must process his imagery if he is to adapt successfully to the churning environment.

Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

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Here is the weird thing. Time is still the same (an hour is still an hour, a day is a day and a minute is a minute) and gravity is still gravity and the relationship between the two, well, remains the same. I won’t suggest there aren’t more things, more stuff, more distractions, then ever, but we – people – manage the same amount of time, the same cognitive skills, and same attention spans that we always have. This becomes a bit important because if we can accept that the world isn’t really going faster, and that there is just more stuff, and the issue is how we, our brains, accommodate all that stuff, then we can begin the hard discussion of the battle of the brain. To be clear this is (a) not an intelligence thing and (b) I’m always a bit surprised workers who work in an office environment don’t understand this issue. What I mean by that is I’ve worked with incredibly smart people who alternatively sucked working in a fast-paced speedy context, like retail, but thrived in a steadier more consistent paced environment. I do not believe that is unique some people thrive in fast paced, assimilating information relatively well and relatively quickly and some people do not. There are intelligent people in both buckets, but in most cases each individual has optimized their neural investment to the context within which they exist AND their cognitive strengths.

Which leads me to the neural investment’s biggest current enemy: technology.

Technology is now all encompassing and ever present. No decision or action or very, very, few can be executed without the tools it provides. This obviously affects the cognition of everyone who uses these tools and will certainly impact individuals, groups, communities, at all levels – psychologically to behaviorally – with human consequences. This is a looped relationship where systems impact humans and humans impact systems. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that humans, even when they are making errors, impact systems. The consequence of all of this is that we are constantly being pushed to the limits of our knowledge and our cognitive potential. Let’s be really clear on this. Technologies target is clear. We may talk about productivity, we may talk about efficiency, but its real target is our brains – intelligence both individually and collectively as a group. I call this a battle of and for the brain. Technology is either purposefully, or just as a consequence, altering the cognition of humans who are often unaware of the attempt. Or, to be generous, we minimize what we believe the effect which only encourages us to react too slowly or just inadequately. We are in a psychological, social, technological, battle whether we accept it or not. We can no longer ignore this important battle. Purposeful or just simply as a byproduct, technology’s actions are manipulating our cognition mechanisms and, in most situations, it weakens it, influences it, and at its worst destroys it. And because this particular piece is about humans this means that we the people need a higher level of discipline. We need to be cognitively aware of our limits as well as better recognize the biased presentation of a reality often digitally altered intended to favor the interests of the one providing the manipulation. We need to increase our cognitive resilience to avoid the exploitation of cognitive biases the increased likelihood of cognitive errors the increased manipulation of our perceptions the increased likelihood of how our attention spans can be overwhelmed or steered and the increased cognitive stress induced. All of the things I just suggested have predictable consequences on our mental acuity or social relations and our motivations as well as the efficiency of communities, society, and organizations. Toffler called it neural investment I’m suggesting that we recognize the cognitive aspects AND make informed decisions on our neural investment. This will be a challenge because this neural investment spans an array of cognitive paradoxes:

• the decision/indecision dichotomy
• cognitive errors and biases
• perceptions and illusions
• influence and manipulation
• psychology and behavior
• the sense of the interaction between users and systems
• autonomy, ethics and motivation in the loss thereof, i.e., despair
• morality and the clash of values

Once again when we talk about neural investment, we are speaking of not only the single person, but including the entire sociotechnological system. From one to many, when technology stresses us, it stresses our ability to solve complex problems which are typically dependent on how information is represented, understood, and developed. Whether we like it or not we must take into account the strengths, limitations, vulnerabilities, and diversity of everyone involved in decision making, i.e., everything in life. This has become admittedly more difficult over time as ‘the enemy’ has grown stronger. As technology has matured the design of it has taken into account the differences and characteristics of users in order to encourage spontaneous use as well as addictive use. Technology has become more knowledgeable with regard to how it can manipulate for greater integration of human users within the system. Objectives have gone from simply facilitating the user experience to instigating, or even dictating, how people behave. It seems like the technology world has basically settled on encouraging the use of digital tools that disrupt, with the intent to affect, all levels of our cognitive processes. They have an influence over our psychological, relationship, motivational, dimensions even sowing doubt or consolidating certainties within our mental decision-making trees consistently targeting individual cognitive abilities directly. Technology is relentless with regard to altering our perceptions, reality and behavior. Worse, once it senses a shift it attacks it. It will seek perception and augmenting and even mental modification and with that we either learn to defend our brains or lose.

Which leads me to experiences memories and attention.

Our neural investment is grounded in our formed images of reality and our formed images of reality are typically grounded in experiences. This does not necessarily mean things that we have actually encountered and done, although those things do create deeper memories, but it could be words we’ve encountered, pictures we’ve encountered and opinions we’ve encountered. All of those things subconsciously gather together in certain parts of our brains and create some memories. Many of those memories are not causal, but actually a concoction of disparate experiences which coalesce into some memory. I worded it that way to suggest that sometimes memories are not exactly the most exact things. And they absolutely are not true reflections of reality, but they are the best that we have. And from those memories we find value. What I mean by that is those memories are valued by our brain therefore when we bring these memories to the forefront either when we’re ready to make a decision or reflect upon the present situation; they represent value. That value drives our attention. The sobering thought to end that discussion is, and this may sound odd when discussing very personal experiences and memories, garbage in & garbage out. Effective neural investment is an attempt to manage the garbage in so that what comes out is just a bit less garbagey.

I bring all that up because when we do talk about Neural Investment or being cognitively overloaded it doesn’t mean that we stop and don’t make decisions. In fact, we make over 30,000 decisions on a daily basis. My point here is that because there are so many of them, and because we do need to invest some brainpower even on the most instinctive choices, we lean in on our memories and apply them to our attention, assess what we elect to pay attention to and make choices. I hesitate to say this, but as a generalization this would suggest that we don’t really adapt successfully to a churning environment. In fact, what it appears we do is take our square peg memories which we have associated value to, use them, and what we discern we need to pay attention to, and put that square peg memory into any shape sized hole that our attention has pointed us to. Effective neural investment won’t completely change that but maybe we could make some inroads on becoming a little less laissez-faire with regard to our attention, experiences and memories.

Which leads me to leaning into attention, experiences, and reshaping memories.

All the speedy looking and feeling stuff only encourages us to grab onto whatever shiny object looks appealing and make more important decisions based on our memory banks. Neither is particularly healthy or helpful.  Unfortunately, we have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” but in order to maintain a thriving life it demands a long view. You need short term results without being shortsighted. You need a long-term view while ‘being’ in the short term. Stealing from Stewart Brand’s “how buildings learn,” I call this ‘navigating the long now.’

Let me explain. Our brains almost demand a long view in order to, well, survive and thrive. Our brains are our personal ‘civilizations’ we exist within a larger civilization system constructed in layers in which there is a very strong, but flexible structure built to absorb shocks and, in most cases, incorporate them. Instead of breaking under stress, like something brittle, the system yields as if it were malleable and yet parts move so slowly, they seem like they are unchanging. So, when it comes to reshaping our memories, or at least how our memories are shaped, we should be thinking:

• Fast learns, slow remembers.
• Fast proposes, slow disposes.
• Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.
• Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution.
• Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.
• Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

All durable dynamic systems, including our brains, have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.  Navigating the long now leverages longevity to optimize value in the Now through what we pay attention to and, as a result, what experiences we have. I suggest all of that because if your ‘experiences’ are shaped by short term, your memories are a bit more fragile and brittle (and certainly of less deep value) and therefore the memories you lean in on when making choices are, well, more brittle and fragile. If we begin to become a bit more thoughtful with regard to what we pay attention to, to how we engage with our experiences, the memories created will exhibit more robust value from which, when tapped, will make future decisions more robust and resilient.

Which leads me to, for some reason, open-source coding.

Open-source coding is an example of a collective group of people taking on a challenge and an issue so that each individual would benefit. The first significant community developed software movement took the intellectual Commons approach. That approach was fairly common in the academic and scientific communities where self-organized collaborative communities of scientists had come together through private networks to pool their brain power or share insights around a particular science or math problem. The Apache Web Server has its roots in this form of open sourcing. I won’t go into detail on Apache, but I recommend everybody reading about its origins. Interestingly. Meta/Facebook is currently doing something similar with Llama. But the real point of intellectual Commons is shared intelligence with the intent to create the best common product possible for the individual. I imagine my second point is that you don’t need a PhD or actually have any credentials and you can contribute. The point is if we could combine our time and collaborate, we can create something better for our brains that almost anybody could effectively manage their neural investment. But to me one of the most interesting points about intellectual Commons and open-source coding is that because of its collaborative construct the coordination and direction is representative of emergent behavior, i.e., it shapes itself to the issues at hand, based on whoever shows up and who actually wanted to write code. And maybe within that is buried my most important point. Neural investment is not just an individual choice; it’s a collective choice. The battle for the brain may be fought day to day within the cognitive constraints of an individual brain, but it’s actually gonna be won through the collective brain. Within our collective imagination and our collective intellectual there’s a solution. We may not have it today but it exists. But, once again, people need to be purposeful because, stated or not, technology is pretty purposeful. It purposefully exploits, often degrades, or even destroys, how someone builds their reality, their mental self-confidence, their trust in processes and systems, and the approaches required for the efficient and effective functioning of communities and societies.

But lets be honest. Technology is not going away. Inevitably we will simply have to make a bargain with technology as it gives & gives and ‘takes.’ This bargain is going to lead to a cognitive battle with technology which will demand a neural investment simply to survive. Ponder.