Way back in my August 25th, 2011, post, I wrote the following:
How do we make sense of the following trends:
- autistic, “nerd,” “database” or mechanical worldviews are on the rise, while at the same time holistic, systems-oriented or biological worldviews are on the decline
- we’re increasingly moving away from knowledge and wisdom, and toward information and utility
- empathy seems to be declining as narcissism ramps up
- secure attachment seems to be on the wan
- we seem to be eschewing face-to-face relationships in favor of digital ones
- we’re increasingly taking up residence in virtual worlds and allowing real ones to decay
- “back work” is giving way to “mind work” (which has lead to widespread unemployment)
In this multi-part blog post, I’d like to look at a wildly fascinating book that I just finished reading:
Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book The Shallows—What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
I’d like to blog about Carr’s book because I think it provides copious amounts of understanding and insight as far as allowing us to make sense of and understand the trends above. What amazed me about Carr’s book is how he pulled from such diverse areas as neurobiology, sociology, information processing, control theory, psychology, conceptual revolutions, cybernetics, algorithms, systems theory, cognitive science, mental models or schemas, and feedback loops. Does the above list seem familiar to you? It was familiar to me. These are, for the most part, the same areas that John Bowlby pulled from as he formulated his theory of attachment.
I finished the above blog post by saying:
In the next part of this blog series we’ll start looking at Carr’s The Shallows. Along the way I hope to frame many of Carr’s observations and insights using Bowlbian attachment theory. But the flow is not one-way: Carr provides information that I think sheds new exciting (but also scary) light on Bowlbian attachment theory. As they say, stay tuned.
Well, I’m back and I’d like to continue on with this blog series. Yes, I know it deals with Bowlbian attachment theory, but I started this series before the board voted to de-emphasize attachment. Plus, I think this series will lead us in a new direction that doesn’t necessarily leave behind Bowlbian attachment theory but actually reframes it in a new (and hopefully fruitful) way.
Early on in The Shallows, Carr makes the following statement:
Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land we see around us, and we advance to ever more accurate, and more abstract, representations of geographic and topographic space. We progress, in other words, from drawing what we see to drawing what we know.
Carr gives us this “bottom line”: “As we go through this process of intellectual maturation, we are also acting out the entire history of mapmaking.” I’m sure you know the cocktail party saying, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This is known as recapitulation theory and is attributed to Ernst Haeckel. According to Wikipedia, recapitulation theory expresses the idea “that in developing from embryo to adult [ontogeny], animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors [phylogeny].” Haeckel was a Lamarckian (as was Freud according to Bowlby) as opposed to a Darwinian. Even though Darwinians have poked holes in Haeckel’s theory, the concept has been used in areas such as “biology, anthropology, education theory, and developmental psychology” (quoting Wikipedia here). Carr is using recapitulation theory to say in essence that how we develop our mental mapmaking abilities as individuals tracks the entire history of mapmaking.
OK, what does mapmaking have to do with Bowlby’s work? Well, Bowlby’s theory holds the following:
If all goes well, early safe and secure attachment relationships between a child and his/her primary attachment figure (typically the child’s mother) lead to the development of open and flexible Inner Working Models.
Inner Working Models are in effect Inner Working Maps. So, on some level, Bowlbian attachment theory is about mapmaking. Bowlby writes the following in volume I of his trilogy on attachment:
As well as having equipment that enables them to recognize certain special parts of their environment, members of all but the most primitive phyla are possessed of equipment that enables them to organise such information as they have about their world into schemata or maps.
Suffice it to say that Carr talks about mental schemata throughout his book. Bowlby continues …
Man’s capacity to build up a detailed representation of the world in which he lives, a topic to which [Jean] Piaget has devoted a lifetime’s work, is obviously far greater than that of other species—and its accuracy for prediction has been vastly increased of recent times by the discovery and application of scientific method.
It’s sad but the cognitive model aspects of Bowlby’s theory (which were greatly influenced by Bowlby’s association with Piaget and his colleague Bärbel Inhelder) are summarily overlooked by present-day students of Bowlby’s work. So, I’m glad that Carr draws our attention to this important work in areas such as spatial cognition, cognitive mapping, and spatial behavior.
Both Bowlby and Carr point to why developing Inner Working Models is so important: they allows us to “translate a natural phenomenon [i.e., perceiving the natural world] into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon [i.e., mental worlds]” (quoting Carr). Spatial cognition researchers (such as Roger Downs, David Stea, Rob Kitchens, Mark Blades, and Reginald Golledge) will point out that we can directly experience our local environment, but we cannot directly experience environments such as “country” or “world.” Quoting Vincent Virga, Carr writes, “The intellectual process of transforming experience in space to abstraction of space [emphasis in original] is a revolution in modes of thinking.”
So, yes, if all goes well, early safe and secure attachment relationships allow us to develop open and flexible Inner Working Models, that is to say, move from experiencing our world directly (empirically you might say) to experiencing our world conceptually. This is a take on Bowlby’s work that is largely overlooked, but it has far-reaching consequences.
So what? What’s the big deal? Why are conceptual maps, models, or worlds so important? For one, conceptual models allow us to engage in what neurobiologist Antonio Damasio calls “as if” operations. In other words, as if operations allow us to look at the real world conceptually as if it were different. And “different” could simply mean a different perspective. Empathy is an as if operation. See where I’m going? If what I suggest above is true—empathy seems to be declining as narcissism ramps up—then maybe what we are looking at is a failure at the level of cognitive schemata, mental models, as if operations, perspective taking, conceptualization, etc. The level I am talking about here is of course the level of cognition that includes the Executive Functions (EF).
EF is associated with such cognitive phenomenon as planning, organization, start/stop, perspective taking, attention shifting and focus, and self-regulation. Is a light going off? These are the functions that are usually compromised when we look at such phenomenon as Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). I recetly attended a workshop on EF where the presenter, Dr. Krista Marchman, told us that ADHD and OCD (among other mental maladies) really should be framed as EF dysfunction. How about Inner Working Model Dysfunction? Is it possible that the fantasies that Freud looked at (and Melanie Klein obsessed over) are in fact placeholders for the actual worlds left unmapped (for whatever reason) cognitively speaking. I make this suggestion because it was Bowlby who said that Freudian fantasy does in fact have real world referents. Maybe recreational drugs are so popular because they can provide us with conceptual worlds (often very bizarre ones) without having to engage in any cognitive mapping. Maybe we can look at Jung’s archetypes as general map patterns over time. This gets to the idea that maps are in fact cultural artifacts that embody mind, a cultural mind that transcends both space and time (a theme looked at in detail in the book Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins). As Elkhonon Goldberg writes in The New Executive Brain, “[N]o other species [speaking of humans here] has the mechanism of storing and transmitting the collective knowledge of the species accumulated over many generations in external cultural devices [e.g., artifacts], such as books, films, and the like.” So, as the individual mind is developed (ontogeny) the cultural mind is accessed (phylogeny), if all goes well. Sadly, the postmodern agenda is focused on summarily disrupting the flow of cultural knowledge via the cultural mind. In a postmodern world, “a young animal embarks on a cognitive voyage, discovering its world on its own” (quoting Goldberg again). Here’s another use for Inner Working Models.
In The Shallows, Carr, using the work of cartographic historian Arthur Robinson as a background, writes the following:
“The combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogic space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed,” writes Robinson, “for it enables one to discover structure that would remain unknown if not mapped.”
Bingo! Edward Tolman, arguably the father of cognitive maps, observed that laboratory rats can discover a route to the reward (typically cheese) that they have never traversed by creating a cognitive map out of paths that have been traversed (usually within a maze). By mapping the environment, rats could then calculate a beeline to the reward that had nothing to do with the prescribed maze routes. In essence, mental models allow us to discover worlds that we have never directly encountered but are implied. Being able to access “implied worlds” or worlds heretofore never directly experienced is a higher order cognitive function. Animals such as rats can engage these implied worlds but they cannot reflect on them. The ability to reflect on implied worlds is a fairly unique human quality (although some primates seem to have an inkling of this ability). Being able to access, engage, and manipulate implied worlds is at the heart of human creativity. It’s at the heart of big ideas. So, I was dismayed when I recently read the following headline: The Elusive Big Idea. This is an article by Neal Gabler that describes how the era of the big idea is clearly waning. As Gabler points out, without big ideas, it’s hard to restart a stalled economy.
So, it’s too bad but the role early attachment relationships play in the development of Inner Working Models and our ability to utilize such models in, say, as if or perspective taking operations, has been largely ignored by present-day attachment researchers. I will point out there is a small body of research that attempts to look at the Bowlbian attachment – Executive Function connection (see Bernier et al.’s 2011 paper in Developmental Science (pp 1–13) entitled Social Factors in the Development of Early Executive Functioning: A Closer Look at the Caregiving Environment for an example).
So, what does all of this have to do with extensive Internet use? Well, Carr effectively argues that extensive Internet use is impeding development of our ability to move back and forth between empiricism (e.g., perceiving the world directly) and conceptualism (e.g., perceiving the world abstractly). I would suggest that in situations where insecure attachment prevails, one would likewise find difficulties in moving freely between empiricism and conceptualism. We have a chicken and egg situation here: is early insecure attachment leading to empiricism – conceptualism imbalances, which then promote a move toward extensive Internet use, or are such imbalances, which are inherently a part of extensive Internet use, bringing about functional insecure attachment? Really hard to say. We may need scientific empiricism to help us tease out an answer.
In the next installment, I’ll look at Carr’s idea that we need what Carr calls “deep relationships” in order to make the move from empiricism to conceptualism. By extension, we need deep relationships to move to the higher levels of cognition that the Executive Functions represent. When I read about Carr’s description of deep relationships, a thought immediately popped up on my mental flat screen TV: “He’s talking about attachment relationships!”
