How do we build a regenerative brain? Early musings

We have all heard about brain plasticity. The ability to change our brain by training it no matter what age we are. We as a society might have to use this capacity over the next 10 years if we are to enable our regenerative future.

I have just finished reading the book by Joseph Henrich’s – The WEIRDest People in the World (2020). I am fascinated with the difference between oral and literate ways of learning, remembering and passing on critical information. Information that enables relationships with the reality of the world, nature and our unique places; helping us to survive and thrive, adapt and change with place.

Henrich, early in the book talks about the skewing of much of the experimental psychology research because results are based on university students participating in experiments – mostly (96%) from Western Europe, North America and Australia; further 70% were American undergraduates. This has then informed everything from policy and marketing, to education and corporate governance. Just take a minute to think about the implications – confirmation bias or what?

“… Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.” Judith Shulevitz

How have these WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) people emerged as the dominant developmental and economic force in the world? And given the impact, from my perspective, how do we adapt how we move forward towards a regenerative future?

Henrich’s claims that WEIRD and non-WEIRD people have very different cognitive styles. WEIRD people are more individualistic, tend to break things down into parts to understand and classify them, are more rational and analytical; they trust strangers and have a strong sense of what’s right and guilt can dominate. Whereas non-Westerners are kinship-intensive, they focus on relationships, holistic connected thinking, punishment is swift accepted without guilt and they do not trust strangers.

One aspect that I found fascinating was the rise of literacy, linking back to Martin Luther and the Reformation 1517. Through the Reformation the protestant faith pushed everyone to read so that they could have a personal relationship with God. This path to literacy he argues is critical to understanding the difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD cognitive styles. Literacy rewired the brain, how it functions and how we relate to the world.

I have an extract from the prelude to the book below (p.i), and then present my musings on what this could mean for a post-WEIRD world. I suspect we will need address these structural changes to enable the ability to think outside the worldview that has created the current problems we are facing.

“Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as it acquired a skill that your society greatly values [i.e. reading and writing]. Until recently, this skill was of little or no use and most people in most societies never acquired it. In developing this ability, you have:

(1) Specialized an area of your brain’s left ventral occipito-temporal region, which lies between your language, object, and face processing centers.

(2) Thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

(3) Altered the part of your prefrontal cortex that is involved in language production (Broca’s area) as well as other brain areas engaged in a variety of neurological tasks, including both speech processing and thinking about others’ minds.

(4) Improved your verbal memory and broadened your brain’s activation when processing speech.

(5) Shifted your facial recognition processing to the right hemisphere. Normal humans (not you) process faces almost equally on the left and right sides of their brains, but those with your peculiar skill are biased toward the right hemisphere.

(6) Diminished your ability to identify faces, probably because while jury-rigging your left ventral occipito-temporal region, you impinged on an area that usually specializes in facial recognition.

(7) Reduced your default tendency toward holistic visual processing in favor of more analytical processing. You now rely more on breaking scenes and objects down into their component parts and less on broad configurations and gestalt patterns.

I suspect that these changes in the brain are one of the reasons Western society has embraced the mechanistic worldview, Chrisna and I discuss in Designing for Hope. We have reduced our ability to think holistically, we have moved to a transactional understanding of the world away from a relational one. Through our literacy we have lost some of the capacity to see patterns and create intuitive connections and most of all we have needed to create the dualities that help us to make sense of the world.

So what now?

Given the power WEIRD people have and our need to find a different development path forward, we have a responsibly to become less WEIRD. Yet here we are, we have rewired out brains, the physical changes have been made. What can we do, in the long term we change this through training of how we think. I am not expert on this, but I suspect we need to collaborate with many different disciplines and non-WEIRD people to create a way forward. In the short term though, I think we should invite non WEIRD people onto projects, onto boards, onto teaching staff, and management, into our governments and decision making bodies. As we have seen recently gender diversity brings robustness and resilience, it is now time to extend this to neurological diversity.