Perspectives: Reinventing human identity
14 May 2008
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Susan Greenfield
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19826562.300-perspectives-reinventing...
I AM not normally a pessimist, but when it comes to what may happen to human identity I declare myself to be a little worried.
My concerns stem from two givens: the malleability of the human brain, and the conspicuously pervasive and invasive quality of
21st-century technology. First, the human brain. As a species, we do not run particularly fast, are not particularly strong, nor do
we have brilliant eyesight. Our forte is our ability to learn and to adapt to the widest possible range of niches. Neuroscientists
have been familiar with the "plasticity" of the mammalian brain for years, and now scanning technology shows just how sensitive it
is to outside influences.
Remember the study of London's licensed taxi drivers, who are required to remember all the configurations and one-way systems of the
streets of the metropolis and who, as a consequence, can take you wherever you want to go without referring to a map. When their
brains were scanned, this huge burden on working memory turned out to be reflected in the enlargement of the part of the hippocampus
which stores information about spatial navigation.
