Sunday 18 June 2006

Pic of the day: Big news! Reality is changing and hyperactive kids are taking over the world! Sort of...

Reality patched?

A year ago I wrote one of the most important entries in my journal. It started a series of grey entries about the upcoming change to the human mind and soul, an upgrade of our brain's operating system so to speak. Will this actually happen? It is not guaranteed, I think, despite the vague promises from mystics of many religions through thousands of years in different cultures. Perhaps it is just something we wish for and reach out for? I will forgive you if you don't believe it until you see it.

Today I will write about something much smaller and more obvious. I will write about the small upgrades or patches to consensus reality in the past, not least the recent past. By "patch" I refer to the practice of companies that operate massive multiplayer games, like City of Hero or Everquest, to launch small upgrades for free to fix problems or add some minor new function to the game. Sometimes these additions contain their own bugs, but unless the bugs are too bad, the change is not rolled back. I think something similar happens to reality as we know it.

Don't think that I have gone all Matrix, cool as at least the first movie was. No, I don't really think the laws of physics change suddenly. Rather I think our shared view of reality can change. Things that we did not notice become important. Things that simply were not done are done. Things that used to be essential fade away. Our way of not just acting but thinking and even seeing the world is different from what was customary before. So far the changes have been moderate each time. It is not certain this will be so forever. But let us take a look at some strange facts.

***

I have mentioned the strange phenomenon that a song can get stuck in your head. This is now so common that we more or less take it for granted. And yet it seems to be a recent invention, within living memory. That is to say, those who are old today did not experience it when they were children, and there is no mention of it in any older sources. The most likely explanation is that repeatable music experience has become part of our reality. The first phonographs were not private property, at least for common families. First with the spread of the wind-up gramophone in the 1930es did a whole new generation of babies grow up with the observed fact that music could repeat. By now, almost the whole planet lives with this fact. And now, the experience of having a song stuck in the brain is taken for granted. I doubt King Solomon had that problem, or he would surely have said something wise about it...

Another extremely common experience is to know something but not remember the word for it, or the name of the person. You have it on your tongue but you cannot say it or even write it. (Actually, have you even TRIED writing it, or are you just looking around in the hope that God has written it somewhere in the surroundings?) According to Wikipedia, and this time I see no reason to doubt them, this was first described in 1885. In each person's life it seems to start shortly after they begin at school, between first and third grade. It also becomes much more frequent in late adult life than among young adults. This rather bashes the brains in on the theory that psychological causes (complexes, the id) causes these errors by kicking the legs out from under the conscious ego. Unless you honestly believe that we get more and more harried by complexes the longer we live. I doubt anyone who reads LiveJournal will subscribe to that.

In my own life, I am very frequently plagued by "tip of the tongue" forgetfulness at work, when I talk to people there at all. It makes up an embarrassingly large part of my conversations there. At home, where I type rather than talking, it is virtually absent. So perhaps it is a conflict caused by literacy? That would explain why it shows up after you learn to write. Perhaps the brain is misdirecting the output or something. Or it could be related to the speed we live at. In primitive rural societies, people walk and talk far slower than we are used to. If you watch a movie from such a place, it is outright boring, as if the locals on purpose are dragging everything out. Darn lazy primitives, no wonder they are poor, we think. Whereas they, when visiting the large city, see people running around like chicken before a fox. Could it be that our brain simply was not made to get up at this time function at this high speed, and that this is why we get the "tip of tongue" experience? It may be a bug that simply did not come up until the speed was raised in the aftermath of the industrial revolution.

As you see from these examples, it is perfectly plausible that we see something as a fundamental human trait, and yet it may be relatively new, or at least much more common than before.

***

How about the recent epidemic of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). According to most sources, the spread of this disorder particularly in the USA is so explosive, there cannot possibly be a genetic reason for it. With the current development, it is only a matter of time before ADHD is the norm, and children without it will be classified as exceptional, possibly even abnormal.

When I first started watching Japanese anime, "hyperactive" was one of the first words that came to mind. The common Japanese word "genki" means both "healthy" and "energetic", and being "hyper genki" is widely considered a good thing within the context of Japanese youth culture. The main characters of an anime, the heroes so to speak, will often be seen starting to talk to each other in the middle of class until broken up by the teacher, while less important characters look at them in surprise. Impulsive behavior and quasi-aggression is also part of the pattern, along with exaggerated body language. In short, the ideal schoolboy or -girl has ADHD.

It is not inconceivable that within a couple generations, classroom education as we know it will be meaningless because the normal, healthy variant of child will be hyperactive and proud of it. They will then flood adult life. According to recent statistics, a large number of 18- 24 year olds now drop out of the work force. They are simply not able to handle what we consider normal employment. Again, within a couple generations this may extend to most young people. Employment as we know it may cease to exist, just like education as we knew it. Hopefully by then the robots will be able to do most of the routine work...

The laws of physics are the same, although we may understand them better. The electrons still do the same tricks as they did a billion years ago. And our brains have barely changed in 200 000 years. But the way we use them is subject to sudden changes, probably set off by changes we make to our own environment. We are creating a new type of reality for us to live in. Not by changing the laws of physics, but by changing the patterns in our brain activity. Kind of like a computer changes completely when you change its operating system from Windows to Linux, or changes moderately when you upgrade from Windows ME to Windows XP. The hardware is the same, but everything is different even so.

Sometimes we can easily see that changes are due to culture, like when square dance gives way to rock and then hip hop. But even fundamental things like the colors in the rainbow or the experience of time are subject to programming, and we do not know it. Well, most of us don't know it. And probably never will, because observations that don't fit the expected pattern tends to be forgotten or changed. Don't be like that. The world is a lot more interesting when you can remember unlikely things.