Daniel Lubetzky

Robert Lee Hotz reports in the Wall Street Journal about how our brains are transformed by the alphabets and languages we learn. Those who learn English and those who learn Chinese use different areas of their brains – confirmed by alternate patterns of energy use and brain structure.   Hotz explains this could also be behind ‘cultural differences in memory, attention, and visual perception.’

Now add evolving changes in learning behavior with the advent of SMS, internet, cell phones, and all instant-input technologies.  Our brains are getting completely re-wired, and we don’t know what the implications of all that will be.

Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan, commenting on a picture of planet Earth taken 4 billion miles away by NASA, showing a fragile speck of blue adrift in an unimaginably vast sea of space. See a film with Carl Sagan’s commencement address at the Pangea Day website.

With growing human population and consumption, our planet is already strained with water scarcity, fossil fuel scarcity, food scarcity, mineral scarcity, and environmental degradation.  Is the big picture that humans will eventually kill each other to compete for scarce resources?

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Perri Klass wrote a very interesting article on the interplay between modern medicine’s use of anesthesia and its interplay with the far less scientific and more mysterious concepts of consciousness and self.  Anesthesia, as he writes,  encompasses "the allure and the terror of leaving yourself behind."

Cosmologist Martin Rees does not think that modern civilization will make it past this century.  Scientific and technological progress carry
with them the seeds of human destruction, whether through the harm we
cause to the environment, or straight out nuclear or biological
destruction.

So ironically, one of the core limitations to connecting with intelligent life elsewhere in the planet is our own unbridled ‘intelligence.’

You can make your own predictions about this at www.msnbc.com/modules/drake/default.asp  
Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos

I often worry about how the recent technological changes will affect society. I particularly am concerned about the impacts of constant-feedback-technology (blackberry, cell, email, voicemail, sms, i.m, – you need input, input, input – like the robot in the movie Short Circuit).  Will attention-span-disorder (like I have) become a regular feature of society? Will today’s kids be able to think strategically and long-term?

Some worry about how technology and the advent of the internet will decrease literacy.  People will stop reading books and newspapers.  But the article below provides a really interesting different angle on how tech evolution will just create different opportunities.

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