Cyberspaced out

What will future minds be like? Jane O'Grady is not convinced by Susan Greenfield's predictions in ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century
Fri 30 May 2008 19.51 EDT

ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century
by Susan Greenfield
308pp, Sceptre, £16.99

"Sorry, can't talk to anyone in the real world right now!" It's not just colonels in Tunbridge Wells who worry that today's teenagers will turn out sinisterly different from previous generations. We all have the hunch that incessant escape to cyberspace (youngsters are in front of screens six hours a day on average) must be having a bad effect. In her latest book, the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield sets out to give this hunch respectable scientific backing.

A baby's brain, she explains, is the passive recipient of myriad chaotic sensations, but gradually it begins to organise them, building up associations, ignoring sensory immediacy in favour of overarching concepts, so that not only meanings, memory and factual knowledge, but also a personal identity, are constructed over time. In Alzheimer's disease (Greenfield's speciality), the process is reversed - accumulated cognitive frameworks disintegrate as physical connections in the brain (neurons and dendrites) decay, until everything is pared back to a fragmented, meaningless present.

But, argues Greenfield, synthesis and self-differentiation similarly degenerate into infant immediacy in schizophrenia. As they do when taking drugs or risks, engaging in dangerous sports, having orgasms and playing videogames. Greenfield is worried that children hyperstimulated by videogames find it hard not only to learn to concentrate, but to learn at all - to build up the necessary mental and neural networks in the first place.

To "us People of the Book", she says, screen images are symbols and factual gobbets informative, but a symbol can only symbolise, a fact only inform, as part of a context in which each can be linked, compared and evaluated in relation to other symbols and facts. She argues that cyberspace kids, blitzed with information from anywhere and everywhere, may never acquire the capacity to see things in context; they may never get beyond the stage of "taking the world at face value", where everything is only what it is, atomised and senseless.

Being able to think and perceive metaphorically, says Greenfield, is essentially what distinguishes humans from other animals, as does the ability to set a present instant of being in the chain of memories forged across time into a personal identity.

What, then, will future generations be like? Greenfield fears that the child habituated to a "strong sensationalist present" will become addicted to thrill-bombardment, and that, instead of becoming Someone, the future human brain will remain No One - a collection of "inputs". Or it may become Anyone - absorbed into totalitarian religion or ideology because the brain and its beliefs, porous to suggestion, have never built up discriminatory defences. To this frightening scenario, she adds the prospect that gene manipulation will ultimately produce "transhumans", purged of defects into bland, uniform "perfection".

None of these warnings is exactly original. Do they have more authority and reliability coming from an eminent neuroscientist? Greenfield compares neurons and people, brains and societies, synapses and relationships. In neat matching tables, she lays out features they have in common - basically that each unit only is what it is by virtue of how it fits into a whole context. The "network" metaphor is her skeleton key to unlock all areas.

But it doesn't. A metaphor works only if it picks out a quality that two different things genuinely, and significantly, have in common, despite being different. Yes, facts, ideas, a person in a society, a person with herself over time, variously connect - but not in any neat way, not literally, not physically as neurons do. Often the specific way in which neurons connect is determined by the way a "personalised brain" (as Greenfield calls it) fits facts or concepts into its personal accumulated knowledge; and this in turn depends (or should do) on the way these facts or concepts themselves fit into impersonal theories. To say that all these disparate things "network" is just a sloppy metaphor which explains nothing until, if ever, the connection between mental and neural is discovered. Meanwhile, as Greenfield stresses, it is absurdly mistaken to try to pin down a specific mental state or function to a specific place or movement in the brain (her beloved network metaphor again). The best anyone can do is match up "biochemical processes with reports of how people feel", and deduce rough correlations.

Yet from such correlations she purports to somehow predict the future state of human brains in general, even though - as she insists - brain formation is absolutely unique in each case. It is not her fault that she can't get from mental metaphor to neural quiddity. It is her fault, though, to give the impression that she can - by leaping so irresponsibly from metaphoric to literal, from mental to neural; or by asserting that neural networking "personalises" the brain. In a sense, it must do, but this simply begs the question, using a formulation that any non-scientist could blithely use - no more authoritative than her account of human individualism as a naturalised version of the Seven Deadly Sins. Despite her expertise, Greenfield is unable to do more than the rest of us - deduce from brain activity and behaviour to speculative causes and effects, and rely on dubious metaphors. If we discard the metaphors, what are we left with? A complaint as ancient as Plato's against writing, or Renaissance elites against the printing press. The neuroscience never marries up with the complaint, just impressively but speciously adorns it. Which is why Greenfield's speculations, interesting as they are, don't get much further than Tunbridge Wells whimsy.
