Is Technology Shrinking Our Brains?
Our brains have shrunk over the past 10,000+ years. One theory suggests technology is responsible. If so, what does this offer us for the future?
In the world of anthropology, we’ve long known that the human brain has been, and still is, getting smaller. It’s been going on for thousands of years. There are several theories as to why, but we’ve no defined answer yet. One theory is because of technology.
Being a technology/digital anthropologist, my curiosity on this tends towards the theory that it’s due to technology. I think it holds weight, so let’s explore.
When Our Brains Started Shrinking
First it’s a good idea to look at when this all started to happen and some of the things going in the world at the time. Then we can look at future implications and explore the role of technology and what I call the theory of Cognitive Sideloading
What research is showing is that our brains seem to have started shrinking somewhere around 100,000 years ago. A time that we shared the planet with some other hominids that were ambling about on two feet. Neanderthals and Denisovans and perhaps a few others we’ve not yet and may never, discover.
Our brains grew rather bigger than our ancestors, chimpanzees and bonobos. We share more DNA with bonobos, which some suggest is why we’re less aggressive than chimps. Bonobos like to use orgies to settle disputes rather than knock each other about. The original free love hippies?
Some scientists theorize we also at magical mushrooms and that enlightened us. This is known as the stoned ape theory.
Your brain, and mine, are about 12.7% smaller than our ancient rellies that lived during the last ice age. The biggest change it seems, happened somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. That roughly lines up with the rise of agriculture. Which didn’t happen overnight. It took around 4,000 years to fully evolve.
There are several theories as to why our brains shrank. Sorry lads, it wasn’t cold water. Or it sort of was in one theory. During the ice age, we needed larger bodies to generate heat to survive. When the climate became warmer, we didn’t need large bodies. Or brains it seems.
It was also around this time that we began to create symbolic artefacts such engravings, cave wall paintings and geometric shapes that carried meaning. Information technology 1.0 perhaps?
This was also around the time we decided that hanging around in larger groups resulted in less of us being on the menu for nasty animals with big teeth and claws. And we could have nice veggies with our side of mammoth steak all year round.
Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersal theorizes that this ended up re-wiring our brains and making them more energy efficient along the way. We just didn’t need all that processing power. Kind of similar to how we’ve been reducing the size of microchips and making them more energy efficient. There are other theories. I’m focusing on the technology one here.
Technology and Our Shrinking Brains
So going with the theory that it is technological advances that are leading to our shrinking brains, it would suggest that as we add more cognitive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, computers in general, from smartphones to tablets, that we are beginning to sideload more of our cognitive capacities.
I call this Cognitive Sideloading because offloading suggests that we dump and forget, whereas we use information technologies to put information that we may want to access again into storage that we can use to recall later, or to augment us. AI tools enable us, especially with Generative AI like Large Language Models, to sideload and assist us for cognitive tasks.
If this is the case, then we might theorize that over time we will, or perhaps already are, rewiring our brains. Already we use language to align ourselves more with computing technologies. Such as when we say to someone “sorry, that doesn’t compute” or “she’s got a brain like computer.”
If we are then rewiring our brains then that issue can also go down a path of an ethical quagmire. If humans who have access to such technologies gain cognitive advantage over time, what about those humans who don’t have such access? It gets messy.
And we are actively trying to augment ourselves with information technologies beyond just physical computing devices. We’re experimenting with BCIs (Brain Computer Interfaces) where we’re directly tapping, physically, into our brains. My view is that we won’t need to hardwire ourselves with BCIs, but rather, we will just rest a device on our heads and it will read and interact with our brains through something akin to today’s WiFi.
Too, if we are beginning to use information technologies in this way and we’re becoming more reliant on sideloading, then that means we have to preserve and evolve technologies such as information transmission (think 5G, WiFi and fibre optics) and information storage.
Perhaps we’ll figure out how to use mycelium networks to transmit information naturally. Some scientists are working to use DNA as a means of information storage. Both would reduce the need for massive data centres, thus reducing the cost of electricity and water.
Will our brains then, continue to shrink? If they do, and it’s associated with technology as one theory suggests, then it could mean, based on the evidence so far, that our brains will become energy efficient and become more powerful. We may upgrade the software and AI could indeed become much more our friend than we think today.
In science-fiction we have long portrayed advanced alien civilizations as having very large brain cases and smaller bodies. Look at ET and of course, The Greys, with large eyes and big heads. What if we got that entirely wrong? What if the real aliens are rather tiny with compact heads smaller than ours?
This is all of course, hypothetical. Biological evolution takes a while, like it took thousands of years for our brains to shrink 12%. But then again, today we have genetic engineering. That too, is a messy ethical swamp.
It’s an interesting thought experiment and it also helps us to think about how information technologies are advancing, the actual role of Artificial Intelligence tools and the very evolution of our species.