Reverse Flynn effect, the primal brain and the future
It is still a mystery why the human brain got so large, but there are some ideas. Rubin Dunbar proposes that the brain got bigger to keep up with the complex social demands on top of an already complex and rich interaction with the environment, the difficulties and planning of hunting, finding or building shelter, the need to grow food, finding patterns in the environment to better grow those crops and so on.
However today, there is a difference in the kind of pressures and necessities we have, overall there is less of the things that privileged the brain going bigger and humans getting smarter.
There is a rich and full spectrum of reality that the human brain is apt to handle and have handled for most of history, plenty of these tasks are being made (thankfully, in some cases) by technology. There is real advantage and improvement in living standards by this work delegation, but there might be a limit. Due the delegation to machines and technologies of most of the hard work, there is in theory more freedom to “higher” or happier pursuits, but things aren’t going as straightforward as this, just as there is more free time and possibilities, this extra time is being filled with things there are way to stressful [1]. Forms of entertainment are also changing and the trend is to always have some sort of screen involved. The cognitive increase is proportional to the demand (to an extent), now the demand comes from screens. Social interactions, jobs, consumption and creation are now mediated by it.
It is important to make a distinction here. There are tools and technologies that substitute physically intense work — cars, airplanes, manufacturing robots\machines, electric lines, etc… the way we interact with them is mostly extrinsic. And there are tools and technologies that replace, “enhance”, or facilitate abstract human activities — everything related to the internet (social networks, etc) or that improve dramatically communication.
While the first type poses no harm (besides the loss of jobs when first introduced) the second plays with intrinsic values and drives— they allow social hierarchies and status perception/seeking to exist in a totally new and artificial environment.
Humans develop these hierarchies naturally:
“the organization of social groups into a hierarchy serves an adaptive function that benefits the group as a whole. When essential resources are limited, individual skills vary, and reproductive fitness determines survival, hierarchies are an efficient way to divide goods and labor among group members.” [2]
Social interaction is no easy thing — this interaction through a technological medium however is not complete, there is not enough sensory data (touch, sight, hearing, smell) and on top of that there are algorithms that recommends your next action, who to talk to, who to compare yourself to, et cetera. The complexity of the endeavor is greatly reduced. While the upsides of using this kind of tool have a bland flavor, the downsides are very real.
While we adapt to new platforms, they occupy the space previously filled by our ancestor’s way, there is a trade being made.
We are over specializing in interacting with these technologies, in detriment to the specialization to interact with the real world.
This new way of interacting with everything will very likely have surprising consequences. A decrease in IQ may be one of them [3][4] or, as this [5] article puts it:
“An intelligence crisis could undermine our problem-solving capacities and dim the prospects of the global economy (…) One leading explanation is that the rise of lower-skill service jobs has made work less intellectually demanding, leaving IQs to atrophy as people flex their brains less.”
This decrease in IQ is being noticed specially in more developed countries. This reversal in the upward IQ trend over the years (Flynn effect) is not yet fully understood, but lifestyle seems to play a big role.
“In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons — meaning the effect likely isn’t due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society. Instead, it suggests changes in lifestyle could be what’s behind these lower IQs, perhaps due to the way children are educated, the way they’re brought up, and the things they spend time doing more and less (the types of play they engage in, whether they read books, and so on).” [6]
We aren’t adapted fully to the modern life in a sense that we can’t stare at a screen all day and feel good. However, if you take the premise of saving energy and taking the path of least resistance coded in our instincts, modern life offer everything a human could desire, food, shelter, even some sort of connection.
But in nature all the things that keeps us healthy are coupled with something else. There is no food without effort, there is no interaction without being physically close to another human, and there is no fundamental pursuit without risk.
Technology allows these pairs to decouple — you can have one without the other.
This poses a challenge to the idea of simply merging with technology to have the best of both worlds.
If we merge with technology there is no guarantee we will purely enhance ourselves, as the reverse Flynn effect could be even stronger due the even greater and seamless delegation of important and energy consuming tasks to computers. The real effect in the brain is in fact unpredictable, and there is the question: when all the pressures that originated the incredible capacities of humans no longer exist and these great capacities themselves are replaced by more “efficient” silicon parts, what remains?
For good or bad the balance could tip to either direction. soon.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736585319307919
[3] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616300198
