The great human brain fade...

Evidence is piling up that the human brain can no longer keep up with the overshoot crisis which human greed has engendered.

H. sapiens has reached a point where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let along do anything purposeful to correct it.

Much though we admire them, our brains are actually quite small and adapted to handling small problems, like shaping a stone tool or inventing a steam engine, rather than grasping the complex sequence that leads to overpopulation, overshoot and – ultimately – collapse.

Today, most people are content to snuggle into their electronic cocoons and pretend it isn’t happening. We divert ourselves with movies, political antics, small wars, travel plans, social media, cryptocurrencies, the latest AI toys and other matters irrelevant to our survival. Entertainment, diversion, tourism, consumption and conflict have become the main features of purposeless human lives. In the end, we may pay the price that all species pay when their ecological niche escapes their ability to adapt to it: extinction

Most poignant of all is the fact that parents, everywhere, seem content to ruin their children’s future for the sake of their own present comfort, convenience and luxury. Their claim to ‘love their children’ is a false narrative, contrived to exculpate their own childlike self-centredness.

“If we were a rational species, we would be galvanized as one in unified pursuit of our survival on the planet,” writes Geoffrey Diehl.

“It is our biggest cognitive impediment that we have only learned to survive as a species that extracts and exploits,” adds George Tsakrilides.

“How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening and did nothing?” wonders David Attenborough.

“Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?” inquires Jane Goodall.

“Our past, our present and what remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now,” declared Silvia Earle.

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former,” remarked Albert Einstein.

Each of these great human beings and thinkers is posing the same question: are humans, collectively, no longer intelligent enough to ensure their own survival on a habitable planet? They remain voices in the wilderness, blocked by the inertia of species-level indifference.

In this context, intelligence refers to both intellectual and emotional intelligence. And to the collective intelligence held by our civilisation and species as a whole, not its individuals (who vary greatly). Even good people now prefer to ignore the challenge to our survival in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence:

- The sharpest rise in global temperatures in 120,000 years

- Accelerating collapse of the Earth’s life support systems and extinction of its living species; spreading deserts and ocean dead zones.

- Growing scarcities of water, forests, topsoil, fish and other life-sustaining resources

- The evolution of ever-deadlier weapons of mass destruction capable of choosing their own targets, and of uncontrolled new technologies as potentially deadly as fossil fuels

- The rising incidence of pandemic disease

- Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits

- The breaching of six of the nine planetary boundaries that support life on Earth.

For millennia, humans have prided ourselves on our technological prowess. For centuries there seemed no limit to the cleverness of our inventions and their uses, to the avalanche of innovation unleashed by two world wars. Then, all of a sudden, technology has swept by us, leaving a species struggling to understand and try to govern the ungovernable.

Even the smartest human cannot nowadays claim to comprehend the full sweep of technology and all its possible combinations and consequences, as it rapidly acquires a momentum of its own. We live in a world where Moore’s Law has gone mad.

It may be a case of humans not being smart enough for our own good. There is amassing proof that the human brain, after decades of growth, is fading and failing.

Over recent years many scientific studies have noted an ongoing decline in human cognitive abilities, when compared with the C20th. “Across age groups, attention spans are shortening, problem-solving skills are weakening, and reasoning abilities are deteriorating,” says one report.

A study by two Norwegian scientists confirmed what had been observed in seven other countries: since the mid-1970s there has been a steady, ongoing decline in intelligence, measured as IQ. This decline followed a period of steadily increasing intelligence throughout the C20th – the so-called ‘Flynn Effect’. The Norwegians felt the decline was unlikely to be genetic in origin. And they were able to estimate that IQ was falling by an average 3.4 points per decade – which amounts to a loss of 15 points or more in human intelligence over the past half century. The trend is noticeably more pronounced among younger generations.

Figure1. Research by the University of Michigan finds evidence of cognitive decline in US teenagers. Source: Financial Times.

Speculation as to the cause of dwindling human intelligence is rife, without much solid evidence to back it up. Screen time, social media and recreational drug use are favoured suspects.

But there is one likely cause that is gigantic in comparison with these. We know for certain that various nerve-poisons common in today’s food, water, homes and city air can inflict devastating damage on the developing brains of infants and young children – and that exposure to these poisons is now society wide, in all people and all nations on Earth. The damage includes surging rates of autism, ADHD, developmental disorders and lower IQ, but other brain diseases such as depression, Alzheimers and Parkinsons are also now being linked by science to the nerve attack on people of all ages and backgrounds.

Humanity is inundated in an immense flood of 200+ billion tonnes of our own chemical emissions a year. Science has invented 350,000 new chemicals and generates 1000-2000 more every year, mostly without testing for human health impacts.

Significantly, countries where the chemical assault is worse – such as the US, where environmental safety laws are being repealed while chemical use is abnormally high – are also seeing the most rapid declines in intelligence. Since intelligence is closely correlated to economic performance, the deterioration in US economics and politics may also point to spreading mental disease and disability in the population.

So, the loss in human cognitive ability is compounding the threat posed by out-of-control technology development and release that is engulfing our society. Even if humans wanted to deal with the new existential threats posed by technologies such as AI, plastics, robotics, nanochemistry, universal surveillance and robot killers, let alone well-known threats like climate change and eco-collapse, we are fast losing the brains to do so.

Physicist Max Planck once remarked: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die...”

And, since the present generations seem unable to comprehend their own rising peril or act together to dispel it, that may well become the human destiny.