THE HUMAN BUG
I read *The Human Bug* six years ago at the suggestion of Camille (Doe), whom I thank again. Since starting this blog, I've often thought about summarizing it in my own style, guaranteed AI-free. The book is fascinating, and this summary is an introduction that I hope will encourage you to read it. Sébastien Bohler is a neurobiologist and graduate of École Polytechnique who, after this book, wrote *Where Is Meaning?*, which you may have read my summary of a year ago.
The Human Bug received the Grand Prize for books on the Brain from the journal Neurologie.
The question that is often asked in this blog, and more generally in everyday life, is: while we see and understand the effects of our behavior on our environment, our future, our lives and those of future generations, why are we unable to control them?
Sébastien Bohler's analysis and conclusions are not particularly encouraging, but they have the merit of providing a scientific explanation for this problem.
His insightful and powerful argument compels us to acknowledge that humanity, and each of us individually, must confront our own responsibilities. Technological evolution has accelerated so dramatically in recent centuries that it would be easy to assume we have lost control of it. The human brain, for its part, has also evolved rapidly in its understanding of this evolution. However, its structure and function react in the same way they have for millennia to what the author calls primary reinforcers, which continue to control us.
I've talked about this book to many of you, and some have already read it. I hope many of you will open it after this summary! You can also listen to the author discuss and present his book in the video at the bottom of the page (French version...).
Enjoy
THE HUMAN BUG
Sébastien Bohler, 2019
Introduction
"For the first time in its history, humanity's challenge will be to survive itself. No longer predators, hunger, or disease, but itself. It is unprepared for this. Faced with this ultimate challenge, its response is nothing but inconsistencies. The proof : why, when we possess extremely precise tools that clearly inform us of the course events will take in a few decades, do we remain impassive? Why, in the face of catastrophe, do we continue to act as we have in the past? What is it within us that is so dysfunctional?
To answer this question, I delved into the most intimate and least visible part of what makes us human. That which eludes us, nestled deep within our skull, so dark and hidden, yet which governs us. Our brain.
What I discovered chilled me to the bone. This brain, presented as the most complex organ in the universe, is in reality a largely flawed organ, prone to destruction and domination, pursuing only its own self-interest and incapable of seeing beyond a few decades. We are swept along in a headlong rush of overconsumption, overproduction, overexploitation, overfeeding, over-indebtedness, and overheating, because a part of our brain pushes us in this direction automatically, without us currently having the means to stop it.
All is not lost, because certain parts of the brain have the capacity to reason differently. But they are in the minority, and they struggle to make themselves heard. To empower this silent minority, we must first understand the power of these forces that operate beneath the surface. Here, I wanted to detail the workings of the deep neural circuits that are leading us to our downfall, so that all those who, like me, desire a different destiny, know who they are up against. For, as the saying goes, you must know your enemy to triumph. The only problem is that this involves knowing yourself.
The concept of overcoming
In February 2018, a large-scale study on resource overshoot in different regions of the world, conducted at the University of Leeds in England, revealed that most industrialized countries regularly exceed their resource limits on at least five of the seven major criteria: water use, phosphorus use, nitrogen use, agricultural change, ecological footprint, material consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions. In return, these countries guarantee certain benefits to their citizens, including access to water, food, heating, and disease prevention, but also to "services" that are far from essential, such as high-speed rail, household appliances, and unlimited phone calls. The study highlights our inability to distinguish between basic needs met through resource exploitation and the desire for comfort, which is largely responsible for this overshoot. And other developing countries are also in a situation of over-saturation, without meeting all the vital needs mentioned.
These signs should alert us. Humankind, in its current form, has only existed on Earth for a few hundred thousand years. Its existence could well be fleeting. Animals like sharks or sponges have hundreds of millions of years behind them. We, with our super-brains, our rockets, and our fantastic symphonies, could well be seen as premature ejaculators. Erased, barely a few millennia after having existed.
We know, but we don't act.
Our awareness of what awaits us seems to have no effect on the course of events. Everything unfolds as if our intelligence were powerless, dominated by deeper, unconscious processes beyond our control. We watch, without reacting, as preparations for our own demise are made. For, in a globalized economy, the situation of planet Earth is identical to that of an island. We are lost in the middle of the universe, we have no other Earth to land on, and the preservation of our natural resources and climate is a matter of life or death.
This capacity for self-division has something tragic about it. Without our knowledge, our brain is playing a trick on us. A very nasty trick. This trick is largely what the book will be about. We must uncover the deep-seated flaws in the very fabric of our own thinking if we want any chance of not soon joining the list of extinct species.
Today, faced with the rapid pace of change in our environment, changes that threaten our very existence, we are like pilots whose warning lights are blaring, signaling an imminent crash, and who suddenly decide, "We have two minutes left, time to make a good cup of coffee." We must abandon the notion of a coherent human mind, master of its destiny, capable of acting through reason to secure the best possible future. Our brain is, in reality, a time bomb. It is driven by opposing forces that it cannot reconcile. Some might consider this a paradox. However, the aim of this book is precisely to show why it is not a paradox at all, but rather a reflection of the antediluvian evolution of our nervous system. Nature does not think, does not foresee. It produces brains that succeed temporarily by proving more efficient than others. And if the most efficient of all ends up digging his own grave, there will be no one to pull him out.
The five secret motivations of our brain
The human brain is programmed to pursue a few essential, basic goals related to its short-term survival, the primary reinforcers: eating, reproducing, acquiring power, doing so with minimal effort, and gathering maximum information about its environment.
British psychologist Robin Dunbar measured the surface area of the cortex in various primate species (…). He observed that the more developed a primate's cortex, the larger the communities it lives in. On this scale, humans reach the very end of this evolutionary process, exhibiting the greatest social organization thanks to a cortex so extensive that it has gradually become compressed within the skull, acquiring its characteristic folded shape.
In addition to its socializing tendencies, the human brain is strongly geared towards toolmaking, a capacity supported by specialized modules in the cerebral cortex. The front of the brain contains planning modules that allow us to imagine future actions, while its lateral regions underpin language and enable us to share these intentions with others and organize collective actions. Finally, a network of cortical areas is specifically dedicated to what psychologists call theory of mind—the ability to represent what others are thinking, to guess their intentions, and to attribute emotions to them. Speaking, imagining what others are thinking, and collaboratively building tools are the cornerstones of the development of highly sophisticated technologies. This potentially limitless process has led to the mastery of the world and, more recently, to its endangerment.
Striatum and dopamine
The striatum is a deep brain nucleus that motivates all our behaviors. When a behavior results in a better chance of survival or gene transmission—whether it's searching for food, mates, social status, or exploring new territories—the striatum is flooded with dopamine, and the behavior in question is reinforced. It's worth taking a moment to examine the mechanism of this dopamine release. Even deeper in the brain than the striatum, bordering the spinal cord that regulates our primary reflexes and certain autonomic functions like breathing, lies a small group of neurons clustered in a small pocket called the ventral tegmental area (see figure below). It is in this deep area, a veritable fuel source, that dopamine is produced. The neurons located in the ventral tegmental area extend their processes to the striatum, where they release this molecule to "reward" the animal in case of success.
Thanks to their long axons, the neurons of the tegmental area connect to three other deep areas of the brain: the nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus and the putamen, which together form the striatum.
Illustration by Tiphaine Roland
A cross-section of the brain showing the striatum, composed of the caudate nucleus, the putamen, and the nucleus accumbens. Buried lower in the brainstem is a fourth area called the ventral tegmental area, which supplies the first three with dopamine.
Communicating primarily through dopamine, these four regions determine many things in the brain. In fact, they hold, directly or indirectly, almost all the levers of power. Thanks to their long axons, the decision-making centers of the ventral tegmental area and the striatum innervate virtually all the regions of the cortex where reason, planning, organization, abstraction, and even memory reside.
Amidst all this, one thing has changed with evolution, but it's a significant one: the human cortex has developed considerably over the last million years or so. By developing sophisticated technologies, whether in food, information, or the production of material goods, this cortex is now capable of providing the striatum with almost anything it desires, sometimes effortlessly. And the problem is that the striatum demands nothing less. It would never even consider limiting itself. It's not designed for that. It has never incorporated this fact; it wasn't specified in its blueprints. We'll see later why and how. The key takeaway is that the striatum takes everything it can get. This is one of the major design flaws of our brain.
1/ The Big Feast
Paleolithic hunters, when they captured a large prey, would spend days eating. They would gather around the carcass and try to cram as much of it as possible into their stomachs in the shortest possible time before it decomposed. This type of instinct likely resurfaces in the binge-eating behaviors observed in some people. The ability to store large quantities of calories in a limited time was probably what ensured the survival of our ancestors for millions of years in an environment where there was no guarantee of easily finding a similarly sized prey the next morning.
Hunger is merely a signal indicating an imbalance in the body's physiological parameters. For the desire to eat to arise, for this craving to guide your actions and constantly draw your thoughts back to food, and your hand to your mouth, what neuroscientists call an incentive is necessary. Today, we know that the striatum is precisely the part of the brain that generates these incentives. And it wields the carrot more than the stick: if the cortex carries out what is written in the official survival program—eating, mating, exploring, conquering, dominating—it will receive dopamine and pleasure. And it works very well.
The impact of this spiral on our environment is now quantified. Our insatiable appetite knows no bounds, and above all, knowing these figures doesn't seem capable of changing our minds, much less reducing our portion sizes. Yet, and this is the most disheartening aspect of the situation, we don't actually need all of this. Our nutritional needs are, at least in the majority of countries around the world, met. We are overproducing and overconsuming, and, logically, overweight. (…) In 2016, the World Health Organization published a report stating that more people on Earth today die from overeating than from undernutrition.
Faced with this scourge, the individual effort made to limit calorie intake and lose weight is experienced as an excessive burden, followed by an inevitable rebound effect: even more weight is regained after the diet ends. The good intentions of our cortex are, quite literally, no match for the unyielding drive of the striatum. Our brain is wired to demand more and more, even when its needs are met.
Mikael's note: "The Human Bug" was released in 2019, at a time when it had just been discovered that medications for treating diabetes were beginning to be used as appetite suppressants. Moreover, stopping obesity treatment with these molecules leads to a rebound effect with rapid weight regain…
2/ Programmed for sex
In recent years, scientists have discovered that the striatum's function is at least as much to generate desire as it is to produce pleasure. Indeed, this brain region is particularly active during the anticipation phase of impending pleasure, as if it were driving both humans and animals to do whatever it takes to obtain it. In one such experiment, it was observed that individuals whose nucleus accumbens showed the strongest activation upon viewing erotic photographs had the greatest number of sexual partners in the months and years that followed. Similarly, individuals whose nucleus accumbens reacted most strongly to appetizing dishes were at a higher risk of becoming obese months and years later. All of this suggests that the reward system is primarily an incentive system, like an internal spring that creates desire and draws sexual partners together.
Brain vs. Porn
The internet pornography industry is the leading industry on the web. There are approximately 50,000 active websites that stream a virtually unlimited number of videos, with a new video being uploaded on average every fifteen minutes. Today, 35% of the videos viewed daily on the internet are pornographic, representing a revenue of $97 billion, with the United States being the largest producer and consumer at $17 billion annually. Every year, 136 billion pornographic videos are viewed worldwide, averaging 348 videos per smartphone user annually, meaning that every second you read these lines, 28,000 people are watching a pornographic video. And we are probably only at the beginning of an even larger phenomenon.
At the end of 2017, Japan's first virtual reality pornography expo was overwhelmed by the sheer number of visitors crowding the entrance, in a country where one in two men under 30 has never had real sex. The throngs of visitors lining the streets in the hope of gaining entry to the expo revealed the immense appeal of hyperrealistic virtual sex for men who are comfortable with digital technology. There is little doubt that these virtual interfaces will be the next global mode of sex consumption.
With the mass consumption of sex, we find ourselves in the same situation as a Paleolithic eater suddenly confronted with the abundance of food overflowing from our supermarkets and fast-food outlets in our major cities. The problem is no longer quantity. The problem is stopping. But, once again, the deep structures of our brain, which operate with a heavy reliance on dopamine, lack a "stop" function.
Understanding why our striatum is unable to moderate itself is a fundamental question upon which some of the major challenges facing our societies and our planet depend. Because if approximately 35% of internet traffic is devoted to watching pornographic videos, this means nothing less than the impact of our striatum's sexual appetite on planet Earth is 150 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year, representing between one-fifth and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions from air traffic.
It is always men who are subject to the most powerful sexual urges of their striatum, with all the contempt and arrogance that this can entail. Meanwhile, other studies on the female brain do indeed reveal a high sensitivity of the reward circuit to the sight of their baby.
Why cats are the stars of the internet
Kittens seem to activate our brains in the same way as babies because they exhibit similar characteristics, which psychologists call neotenic. Neotenic facial features include a small nose, a small chin, large eyes, and a large forehead. These features are very pronounced in babies and diminish with age as the chin and nose develop. The more neotenic a face is, the more it elicits protective behaviors, which has likely played a crucial role in the survival of our species, where newborns are very vulnerable. It seems that our visual system automatically reacts to the presence of such stimuli with feelings of tenderness: for our brain, two large eyes, a small nose, a small chin, and a large forehead are stimuli that immediately evoke positive emotions. Faced with them, our striatum releases dopamine, and we remain glued to our screens, spending the day surfing YouTube in front of little balls of fluff.
This basic instinct carries between ten and thirty gigabits (between ten and thirty billion binary pieces of information) per second at the time we speak, and releases a good million tons of carbon dioxide onto the surface of the globe over a period of one year.
A fatal stubbornness
We don't change our behavior, however. Many of us are beginning to learn that the extraction of raw materials like rare earth elements used in the manufacture of screens and smartphones, as well as the maintenance and use of internet servers on a global scale, destroys hundreds of animal species and releases millions of tons of greenhouse gases that will later drive entire populations from their homes; but nothing changes. We don't shift our priorities, and we prefer to see naked bodies mating on screens or kittens trotting on angora carpets, even if it means facing more pressing problems later on, rather than taking control of our own destinies. Understanding why we are trapped in this immediacy is the central question of the book.
At some point, we will have to ask ourselves why we remain so controlled by a handful of dopamine-producing neurons in the center of our superbrains. Part of the answer lies in the immediate appeal of primary reinforcers. No other species has pushed the obsession with dominance and social status to such extremes. This constant social game is a source of enormous energy expenditure and also causes immense damage to our environment.
3/ Reaching the top of the pyramid
Early Homo sapiens hunted in groups and managed to capture large prey thanks to the planning and coordination capabilities of their communicating brains. The best hunters were rewarded for their personal achievements, their technical skill, and their ability to coordinate the group's actions. These influential individuals, in return, enjoyed larger food portions, the deference of their companions, and the attention of women. We now know that they reproduced more frequently, and that the social rank an individual could attain was reflected in their offspring. The genes of a dominant individual were passed on more extensively to the next generation.
The ability to accurately and reliably identify gang leaders was likely a survival condition in our evolutionary past, enabling us to form alliances capable of overcoming dangers and securing food. This fascination with leaders is a constant in our individual and collective behaviors, and it generates an incredible amount of money today in the media industry surrounding sporting competitions.
Human beings seek victory because it places them at the center of a hierarchy that will bring them multiple advantages: material income, food resources, care, access to sexual partners, the possibility of reproducing.
For each of us, comparing ourselves to other human beings is essential: the same experiments reveal that striatum activity only manifests when we win against another human, not against a machine. Video game players who win against software do not activate their striatum. What matters is the ranking. It's the comparison. It's not about succeeding at the game, it's about climbing the hierarchy.
Social comparison is a powerful driver of our behavior, deeply ingrained in our genes and mental processes for hundreds of millennia. The reason is simple. People driven by strong social comparison are certainly always on edge, never satisfied, anxious about not being at the top of the hierarchy, and may spend their lives striving for social advancement. But in reality, they will have access to more material goods, power, and sex than others. And, mathematically, in large population samples, their genes will be favorably selected, simultaneously transmitting the attraction to power and social status.
Thanks to large-scale genetic studies conducted across the Asian continent, scientists have, for example, been able to trace the entire lineage of the Mongol leader Genghis Khan, and thus establish that this general fathered approximately 0.5% of the world's population during his conquests through thousands of rapes perpetrated on women reserved for him, given his rank. Today, one in 200 people on Earth is likely a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. That still amounts to approximately 35 million people worldwide.
A brain built to dominate
The thirst for prestige, positions of power, and privileged social situations is a mechanism as old as time, and virtually indestructible. This persistent force now threatens to suffocate us, not only by poisoning relations between the sexes, but also by causing profound damage to our lifestyles and our environment. Social comparison, the default software installed in all our brains (especially men's), creates a conditioning. Consider the daily lives of millions of people at work. What are they preoccupied with? Earning a decent wage—and, if possible, a high one—but above all, a wage higher than their colleagues'. Most surveys show that it's not so much the absolute wage that matters—as long as it allows for a decent standard of living—but the relative wage.
The fundamental driving force remains ambition and domination. And it all plays out in a few cubic centimeters of neural matter in a man's brain.
Muscular striatum
Here we are at the heart of the problem. To feel dominant, we are willing to make great efforts, and we don't concern ourselves with whether this will have a negative impact, in the long run, on the world we live in. When we buy a large, polluting car or an equally polluting cell phone, we don't ask ourselves if, in twenty, thirty, or forty years, this will translate into poorer living conditions for future generations. The only thing we remember is that it feels good. We experience a rush of euphoria, and our brains reconfigure themselves to make us feel what it's like to be superior to others.
It reconfigures itself, because when you climb a rung in the social hierarchy, your genes start producing a quantity of proteins which, in your neurons, associate with dopamine and multiply its effects tenfold.
In Homo sapiens, the desire for social status is manifested by the acquisition of artificial outward signs, such as shoes, cars, telephones, or dining in the best restaurants or attending the most prestigious concerts.
Ultimately, our situation of overproduction and overconsumption results from a fatal convergence between, on the one hand, millions of human minds yearning for social status and, on the other hand, an industrial apparatus now capable, for the first time, of providing everyone with ten pairs of shoes, three computers, tablets, or laptops, one or two cars every five years in fully equipped versions, and just as many household appliances during the same period—but the list goes on. The consumerist catastrophe in which we find ourselves would not exist without these two ingredients: the brain of a primate and the technology of a god.
This bombshell has exploded in our faces today for a very simple reason: for thousands of years, humankind held back. Signs of social status were reserved for an elite, often called the nobility, then the upper middle class. Everything changed during the 20th century in industrialized countries, when the concept of well-being became more widespread and, at the same time, industrial progress enabled the mass production of not only comfort goods but also luxury and prestige items.
4/ The blessing of unemployment
The law of least effort, right after the law of maximum food intake, excessive sex, and dominance, is a fundamental tenet of animal behavior, and even of the behavior of an "evolved" animal like a human being. And it's etched into the very fabric of your striatum.
The problem is that another factor has emerged on the cultural and technological timescale: in our modern, industrialized societies, work has become necessary for individuals to achieve usefulness and social standing. However, as we have seen, social status is as important to the striatum as the law of least effort… Conclusion: our striatum is caught in the crossfire. It is experiencing its first internal crisis.
New social order
This is where our digital world comes in…
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are machines for manufacturing virtual social status. Today, Facebook has over two billion users. Each of them maintains a "profile," which is a self-presentation for all to see. It's an image presented to the human community, which its owner strives to make as appealing as possible, including photos and details of their personal life.
Thinking you're important and doing nothing
Facebook tickles a very sensitive nerve in our brain: self-esteem. This concept refers to the opinion each of us holds about ourselves. This feeling of self-love and self-respect depends partly on the trust our parents placed in us and, later, on our personal achievements, but also partly on how others see us. This is where social media has found a way to invade our lives, because it constantly subjects us to the gaze of others and their comments. The problem is that we aren't necessarily made for this (...). On the other hand, the striatum loves it. It's the real customer of Facebook and Instagram.
Why are teenagers particularly helpless in situations with high social stakes? The answer is that their brain is, in a way, a "pure striatum". Around the age of 15 in boys – a little earlier in girls – the central parts of the brain such as the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the pallidum or the caudate nucleus, whose neurons communicate by releasing large amounts of dopamine, are in full development, which results in an awakening of sexual desire but also a strong sensitivity to questions of social status.
5/ Informed, over-informed
The human brain, among its many functions, is an information-processing machine. Its appetite for any information that improves its chances of survival constitutes the fifth driving force that activates its pleasure circuits. The first four, as we recall, are food, sex, reduced exertion, and social status.
The problem lies in the fact that our brains have remained essentially the same over the last few millennia, while our living conditions have changed on a scale that is difficult to imagine. In just a few millennia, humanity has gone from a relatively information-poor environment to the hyper-information-rich one that is the modern world. This has significant consequences.
Information overload, an insatiable appetite for information
We are victims of a trap: our brain's information-seeking systems have been subjected for millions of years to a very limited diet in an environment where usable data was scarce and highly sophisticated detectors were required. As with food, no limits were designed for this system. Once immersed in this society of excess, the same thing happens as with abundant food: we gorge ourselves without restraint.
Here again, our behavior is primarily determined by the striatum, and not by reason. We have become informationally obese, a phenomenon known as infobesity (…).
Knowing the weather warms the weather
From an environmental perspective, the global insatiable appetite for information contributes to keeping web servers running at full capacity, with direct consequences for our environment. In 2016, Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross calculated that a single Google search, of which there are over five billion per day, generates the same amount of heat (through energy transmission along internet connections and due to the high heat output of internet servers) as boiling half a cup of coffee. Knowing the weather in Rennes is like checking the weather in Rennes. This is the new reality of humanity, which has become a danger to itself.
Game designers have combined a number of elements to create a form of addiction by specifically targeting the dopamine neurons activated by games of chance. It is when the gratification is difficult to anticipate that these dopamine neurons fire the most. Thus, some people see their lives fall apart because of a simple video game that invades every aspect of their existence, like the woman who ended up playing Candy Crush Saga for five hours a day, forgetting her appointments and unable to concentrate on her daily tasks.
The over-armed child syndrome
At this point in our reflection, it is time to pause and take stock of the phenomena we have just described.
If we wanted to act for something other than satisfying our five primary reinforcers, we would have to invent a way to muzzle the activity of our striatum through the conscious efforts of our will and reason, housed in our cortex. Some have tried. Many philosophers, from Socrates to Lucretius and Descartes, as well as religions and spiritual movements, have attempted this by advocating temperance, even contrition, sometimes even penance—all to no avail. No sacred book or doctrine can fight against a neural system forged by hundreds of millions of years of survival, pain, and pleasure. We may well be at an impasse.
The Reign of Incoherence
Growth as the only guide
Growth is the dogma that permeates every aspect of our societies. Even faced with a catastrophe that imminently threatens our way of life, we would not cease to advocate for growth. It would not occur to anyone (or very few people) to seriously question this dogma. Whatever happens, production must increase, consumption must rise, GDP must increase, purchasing power must climb, and the standard of living must rise. We have internalized this idea to such an extent that we have become incapable of thinking otherwise. We are frozen in our outdated brain structure, confronted with a world that is changing too fast because we have made it changeable, and this world is beyond our control. We are hurtling like runaway projectiles through space, with neural equipment that has worked wonders for five hundred million years but is now about to explode.
What is it in our brains that conditions us to seek not just food, money, sex, and social status, but ever more money, ever more food, ever more sex, or ever more status? Half the book was devoted to showing how a particular structure in our brain, our striatum, constantly drives us to achieve these goals. But by refining their methods of analysis and measurement, scientists have recently made a new discovery: the striatum only does all this to the extent that it can do more and more of it.
Programmed to always want more
Our reward system is only activated if we obtain more than we expected. Anticipated results do not produce pleasure. Only a result exceeding predictions is valued. The maxim of our behavior is:
MY BRAIN REWARDS ME IF I GET MORE THAN LAST TIME
Our brain constantly makes predictions about the outcome of each of our actions. This results in the anticipatory firing of dopamine neurons as soon as we begin an action that could lead to gratification. The brain decides whether or not to maintain a behavior based on the difference between the prediction and the outcome. If the difference is positive (the outcome exceeds the prediction), the behavior is strongly stabilized. If it is negative, the behavior is eliminated. If the difference is zero, a feeling of weariness sets in, and we are ready to take any action that leads to a superior result.
The habituation process is virtually endless. Increased wealth, food, or sex only produces fleeting well-being, which must immediately be followed by further increase. The cue-prediction-result pattern is entirely predictable. The only way to derive any pleasure from this whole affair is to increase the doses.
Unfortunately, the same logic is at work in our pursuit of social status. Once a certain position is achieved in the human hierarchy, the dopaminergic system becomes blunted. So what about the prospect of falling down a rung in the hierarchy of one's goals and ambitions? It's simply unbearable. Dopamine is responsible for the fact that all tyrants or dictators of authoritarian regimes cling to power even when everything seems against them, and are prepared to commit the bloodiest massacres to avoid seeing the concentration of dopamine in their cortico-striatal synapses drop by even a microgram.
Plundered Planet
“What kind of world are we going to leave to our children?” A recurring question and a legitimate concern. But our decisions aren't the result of a single concern. They stem from weighing several factors. Concern for our children's quality of life is one, but it carries little weight because we know that insulating our homes, eating less meat, replacing Google searches with direct access to our favorite websites, prioritizing public transportation, and no longer flying represent a considerable effort that will likely have no effect on our own children's future if billions of other human beings don't make the same effort. We are trapped in a circular argument that is reflected even in political discourse, such as when Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement because there was no reason for the United States to limit its CO2 emissions if the Chinese didn't do so.
In Western Europe, 80% of the population has no doubt that human activities are the cause of climate change and threaten the balance of biological systems as well as our own future as a species. The figures in the rest of the world are more varied: in the United States, the role of human activities is recognized by only 48% of the population. In Asia, public authorities are alarmed by pollution levels, particularly in China where it is becoming impossible for residents of large cities to live without protective masks.
The specter of environmental destruction hits us full force. It paralyzes us with shock and leaves us unable to react. We voice our concern, agreeing that urgent action is needed. But we don't act. Some courageous associations or individuals are taking action. We sort our waste more. We try to better insulate our homes. But when clear-sighted reports, based on validated scientific measurements, remind us that a single long-haul flight, through its carbon footprint, negates a year's worth of household waste sorting efforts, we prefer to think about something else. A complete overhaul of our habits? That would be too difficult.
In 2017, studies were published showing that there would likely be no more fish left to catch in the oceans by 2050. This sparked a reaction of disbelief for a few months, then it was forgotten. It's as if we, as human beings, are incapable of drawing conclusions from our own observations to decide on concrete, collective, and long-term actions. What is the cause of this powerlessness? Why doesn't the thought of a future catastrophe lead us to change our behavior?
We are prisoners of the present
When it comes to making a small, immediate sacrifice, it's as if our thoughts about the future vanish like a mirage. The pleasure and ease we can afford now carry a hundred times more weight in our decisions than considerations of a distant future.
This is one of the fundamental laws governing behavior, and it applies to a multitude of areas. The smoker, knowing the risks of illness and suffering he incurs by lighting his cigarette, will still do it to obtain his instant pleasure…
This phenomenon is called temporal devaluation. It boils down to a simple idea: the further away a benefit is in time, the less value it has for our brain. Despite variations related to personality and personal history, all individuals are subject to this temporal devaluation. To explain it, neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz's team demonstrated that the strength of the dopamine release depends on the time lag between the announcement of the reward and its actual arrival…
A large-scale replica of a time devaluation experiment was provided in France by the Yellow Vest movement. At the time, 8 out of 10 French people supported the mobilization; the government's absolute priority was supposed to be purchasing power. As a reminder, the fuel tax increase was intended to finance the ecological transition to renewable energies. The choice was between having less purchasing power now to preserve the planet in twenty years, or preserving purchasing power now by mortgaging the distant future. Time devaluation was activated simultaneously in thousands of minds. Of course, we can also point out the government's timing problem and, above all, its communication issues…
That said, studies of animal behavior show that there is generally a survival advantage to seizing any opportunity that presents itself immediately. The benefits of "everything, right now" have helped us survive on timescales we can scarcely imagine. For tens of millions of years, animals with a striatum configured to prefer immediate rewards managed to stay alive, and the others were simply eliminated from the evolutionary race.
Modern man is not entirely condemned to function in this way. Over the last tens of thousands of years, he has developed a capacity for prediction that allows, for example, a student to dedicate long years to working in his room without reaping any material benefit, hoping to obtain a degree that will guarantee him a comfortable life several years later. But these predictive capacities are ensured by other brain areas, notably those of the frontal cortex, which provide access to hypothetical representations of the future. The essential question that arises, therefore, is whether the striatum or the frontal cortex truly controls our choices and decisions.
The frontal cortex has the capacity to wait, because it is in its neural circuits that a particular type of neural information circulates, which allows the same idea to remain present in consciousness for entire minutes, or even weeks or months, sometimes even throughout a lifetime.
What enables one person to keep important future goals in mind, while another thinks only of the present? Answering this question is essential because our inherent inability to act collectively to preserve the future of generations to come stems precisely from our pathological attraction to the comforts of the present. While there are likely genetic differences between those capable of thinking about the distant future and those who succumb to the allure of "everything, right now," it is primarily factors related to education and the socio-cultural environment that prove decisive. The frontal cortex undergoes a long maturation process throughout childhood and adolescence. This maturation will only be strengthened if the child's parents and educators encourage and help them resist their immediate inclinations.
The brain system that allows us to choose between immediate gratification and delayed action is therefore plastic; it is not fixed once and for all. But when you become accustomed to having everything instantly, you lose the physiological function that allows you to forgo something now in favor of something else later.
The reign of impatience
This is what has happened to us. We now live in a world where waiting times for anything—whether it's food, alcohol, tobacco, sex, status, or even money—are reduced to the bare minimum. We have become impatient, we have all succumbed to our striatum, and we can no longer put immediate comfort aside in favor of a future goal.
The really bad news is that our dependence on instant gratification seems to be intensifying from generation to generation. In 2017, a large-scale study was launched on Millennials, who grew up with communication technologies and rapid transportation. Sociologists at the University of Leeds in England examined their level of impatience compared to previous generations. They found that, overall, Millennials are characterized by a limited capacity for waiting and rely heavily on online services to get what they want. Approximately 70% of young Britons use same-day home delivery services, three times more than any other age group.
In 2015, a larger study conducted in Great Britain on two thousand people showed that the average Briton was willing to wait ten seconds for a web page to load and 16 seconds for a video to load, beyond which they start to lose their temper.
We are gradually sliding towards a world where everything is moving faster and faster. Our mental capacity for waiting is eventually being depleted.
Incontinent brains
Another consequence of our growing impatience is that we can no longer tolerate overly long pieces of information. ;)
An online newspaper article on a news website, a text message or a Facebook post – all of these must be short.
According to a recent study, the average concentration time of an 18-year-old in front of digital information is eight seconds, which is 30% less than in 2000.
Equipped with brains so easily overwhelmed, how can we possibly think about the future of our world, the long-term survival of our ecosystem, and the preservation of the planet? When instant gratifications that appeal to our striatum by targeting its basic needs like food, minimal effort, sex, and social status are offered to us here and now, what could possibly stop us from seizing them without delay?
At the end of this process, humankind has become a mortal danger to itself. Its deep neural programming continues blindly to pursue goals that were profitable for much of its evolution, but which are no longer at all suited to the era into which it has been thrust. Given its current situation in a globalized world, humanity is maladapted. The tragedy of its condition lies in the fact that its technological means, while increasing over the centuries, have always been used exclusively to serve the priority objectives of its striatum. The over-armed child of today has no limits. The great question that now confronts us is: can humanity seriously define for itself goals other than those dictated by its striatum?
THE PATHS TO SOBRIETY
Ideologies come and go, while the only clearly discernible evolution in human history is the accumulation of technology. The quantity and diversity of technical tools available to humans are constantly increasing. Yet, these technologies are entirely at the service of our primary reinforcers.
What choices do we still have? Fulfilling our own desires is fundamental to our core values. We realize that this is depleting our energy reserves, our sense of well-being, and our environmental responsibility, but changing the paradigm will be difficult. However, two options remain.
The first, very audacious, approach consists of beating the striatum at its own game. Rather than directly opposing its action, the aim is to divert its energy, like diverting a river, so as to power a turbine rather than letting it devastate the dwellings located below.
The second method involves appealing to a unique human capacity: consciousness. The strength of the striatum stems from the fact that its commands are unconscious. They are like shadows. As soon as they are brought into the light, they vanish.
Parental discourse, followed by that of schools, the media, and politics, by socially valuing behaviors such as altruism, moderation, and respect for the environment, can lead our striatum to see things from a new perspective. From the moment social status is associated with environmentally conscious behavior, the battle will be won. The striatum will have become the driving force of preservation, not destruction. This type of approach remains fragile over very long periods, because primary reinforcers are innate in our biology and will have the advantage of consistency over tens of thousands of years, whereas operant conditioning must be constantly re-established.
Today, the only values shared by a majority of citizens in the Western world are individual liberty and human rights. But it is precisely these same values that have led to our current situation. Far be it from me to discard them, and I insist that everything written here must always be weighed against the fact that the liberal economy has reduced violence in our societies, pacified trade between nations, lowered infant mortality, and advanced vaccination and literacy rates. But these values, too, may well be reaching their limits, at least in the way we put them into practice.
We have completely perverted the liberal ideal stemming from Enlightenment humanism by reducing freedom to the ability for each individual to satisfy their primal urges. Our freedom matters far less to us today than our comfort.
DOING MORE WITH LESS: THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
We live better, we live longer, we succumb less to disease, and we no longer die of hunger. But behind this remarkable ability to find technological solutions to improve our material lives, the underlying forces that drive us remain utterly impenetrable. We excel at achieving our goals, not at setting them. The only criterion that guides our actions is technical feasibility.
In short, we behave like beings with a high level of intelligence but a low level of consciousness. This consciousness is often neglected, and we develop it far less than our intelligence. Bringing our level of consciousness to a level comparable with our level of intelligence will undoubtedly be a major challenge for the future of our species.
A few years ago, neuroscientists discovered that knowledge itself could constitute a form of nourishment for the striatum. In a way, it might be possible to satisfy the appetites of our striatum through knowledge, mental exercise, and, more generally, by stimulating curiosity. This represents a potentially promising resource for the economy of the future, as well as an interesting alternative to the material growth that is currently the sole objective of next-generation industrial devices, including digital ones.
The fork in the road before us is highly likely to be this: in a world without work, will we be busy stuffing our striatums with cheap food, online sex, constant information, and virtual self-esteem, or will we devote more and more time to developing our awareness of ourselves and others, and enriching our lives through the exchange of ever-expanding knowledge? Continuing to promote an economic system that encourages our primary reinforcers is arguably the worst thing we can do, and unfortunately, that's what we've been doing for almost a century now, and it's costing us our planet.
What chance does knowledge have of establishing itself as a central value in our societies? We must be realistic. Knowledge is not as captivating or addictive a stimulus as food, sex, or social prestige. To make it a powerful motivator capable of competing on equal terms with these forces, it needs an ally. That ally is the social norm. It is up to society as a whole to value knowledge, making it attractive and enriching for our minds. Political leaders, the media, publishers, and economic players can all contribute.
We have a long way to go. We are not ready to live with fewer primary reinforcers and more awareness. When will we be? The next generation, said to be more aware of environmental issues, is also more impatient and more dependent on new technologies. The nightmare seems to continue.
To be continued in the next issue?
Comments