Dear Reader,

What if you were to bring a Cro-Magnon infant from 30,000 years ago to the 21st century? More than likely, they would grow up to be as capable as any modern child at computer coding, flying a plane, or performing any other complex modern task. Surprised? Well, the consensus among evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists is that Homo sapiens of 30,000 years ago were biologically identical in cognitive potential to humans today. This is probably so, but genetic mutation and natural selection can also have profound results!

A human 30,000 years ago had the brain volume and the same neural plasticity and possessed the same capacity for creativity, curiosity, and inventiveness as we have today. Think of them like your computer with its hard drive without the current operating system. In fact, the average human 30,000 years ago might have been more mentally agile than we are today. Selection pressure was immediate, often resulting in death before reproduction. Interestingly, the average human brain size has actually decreased by about 10% over the last 20,000 years. This may be due to the "Domestication Effect," where living in larger, safer societies requires less individual "raw" processing power for survival.

Living in agricultural settlements exposed humans to new pathogens from livestock and waterborne illnesses from poor waste management. It only got worse with high-density cities. More disease created a strong selective pressure on the immune system and the microglial immune cells of the central nervous system, important for maintaining a healthy brain through synaptic pruning. A recent study of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, depression, epilepsy, and obsessive-compulsive disorder links such disorders to microglia synaptic pruning or the lack thereof.

Enter the SMARTPHONE: Research shows that "heavy smartphone users show lower gray matter volume in regions such as the prefrontal cortex, critical for cognitive control." This may also be true for excessive computer screen time, whereas reading physical books may actually enhance gray matter in these areas.

Food for thought? Less screen time? Yes, new dangers stalk the land, and for all our technology, new challenges await. While we have likely become more metabolically efficient on a calorie-dense, nutrient-narrow diet, trading raw volume for higher synaptic connectivity and specialized metabolic pathways allowing for higher cognitive output, the opposite can also be true, as the links above illustrate.

This from Thing FIRST CONTACT: "The dark video games were getting more potent and there were more of them, but perhaps most chilling was that several adult NSA agents had played the games and were in a catatonic state like that of the gamer kids. There was agreement among the doctors and psychoanalysts that the victims showed signs of Akinetic Catatonia where the patient stares blankly and doesn't respond when spoken to. Other symptoms were assuming unusual body positions and resisting when the therapist tried to get them out of these positions. The report said that recovery rates had gone way down and were almost nonexistent in the latest cases."

That describes the early stages of the Digital Catatonia, a key theme in the story. Have we reached the level of the Digital Catatonia, the mind virus from the book? Maybe not, but it is certainly allegorical of our time. Are we more and more subject to a device-induced mind virus as our gray matter disappears into our screened devices?

There is no question that through our devices, the interaction between a user and the internet is no longer a linear request-response relationship. It has now evolved into a digital feedback loop where the user's input, both conscious and subconscious, is harvested, processed, and used to alter our digital environment in real-time. Unlike biological evolution, which takes generations, digital feedback loops evolve at compute speed, using the internet and the cloud to process billions of inputs per second. This is the "virus" in the feedback loop, infecting billions of minds. A virus that can undergo a century of evolution in a single afternoon, making it the most rapidly adapting environmental force humans have ever encountered.

A mind virus from the internet, an alien in our midst... AI revolution! Don't get me wrong, I use this stuff all the time now, but certain things begin to reveal themselves. So ask yourself, having come from a world where we controlled our environment, is this the convergence, the final step, just before we become the environment?

Next month we will explore this "convergence!"

Share your thoughts, and yes, share your own AI images from using ChatGPT or Gemini and any of the other AI platforms. Be sure to include the query language you used to generate the image. You can do so by responding to this email.

Quote from Frank Cameron Jackson, philosopher: "I agree, in much company and with you, I take it, that experiences as such are not conscious... I think it should be common ground that there is an element of illusion in our thinking about what it is like to be in various mental states."

Until next time, be well and safe journeys.

Sincerely,

Kendall Williams, Author

​kendallwilliamsauthor.com​

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