Networking Brains: Making Change Happen with Bits

I. Introduction

The "network of pipes and switches" metaphor we have used to understand the internet in this class is also useful for understanding how brains work. At a high level of abstraction, a network can be understood a system where there are two basic categories of things, things that receive, process, and transmit information ("switches"), and things that serves a conduits along which information can flow ("pipes").

To apply a consilient approach, the network model is useful for thinking about brains on two levels, personal psychology and social sociology.

II. Personal Psychology

On the level of personal psychology, the primary benefit of the network metaphor is that it highlights the importance of multiple networked agencies within what we often understand as a unitary self. Our conscious mind, the stream of phenomena we experience, is at any moment, just one switch connected by pipes to many unconscious switches doing important receiving, processing, and transmitting work.

Understanding that our subjective experience is shaped decisively by information-processing and transmitting units within us the operation of which we do not perceive helps us think in productive ways. We realize that our views are shaped by unconscious biases, and that our thinking can influenced by our context. We can try to take corrective measures. Realizing that we have only partial agency helps make the best use of that agency.

Another beneficial valence of the network metaphor, which reinforces that sense of agency, is its presumption of regularity. Computer networks are incredibly complex, but we operate with the assumption that there are knowable regularities to computer networks. We can use knowledge of those regularities to engineer them.

Often in our culture the subconscious is depicted as an irrational "Heart of Darkness." It contributes to a sense of empowerment and agency, however, if we can think of it as subject to knowable regularities.

If the brain is a network, we might be puzzled by the activity of its "invisible switches," but we keep in mind that with systematic observation, we can understand something of how they work and try to improve system performance (however defined).

These knowable regularities might be thought of as emerging from the interaction of genes and experience (in the form of memories encoded in the brain). We might call that the source code of a person. Genes may be fixed (though their expression can be mediated by environmental factors), but memories can be added to or reinterpreted. If, in Larry Lessig's metaphor, software code is law, this psychological source code is also law.

III. Social Psychology

Moving up a level of analysis, the network metaphor is also generative of useful insights when applied to social psychology. One quality of a using a network metaphor to look out at the social world is that it highlights the critical importance of information flows. Musician Ian MacKaye, talking about his childhood in Washington D.C., which involved a significant amount of skateboarding, related once that skateboarding was an important phase of his life. It trained him to look at the world as a place full of opportunities to ride a skateboard off things, not just a venue for the conduct of ordinary life. This was, on later reflection, an education in the power of looking at the structures of the world differently than most and using them in a different way - hacking, in a sense.

Similarly, a social grouping of brains is a lot of things at the same time, but if, using a network metaphor, we focus on how interlinked our brains are, we see a rich array opportunities for communication and social change. If, as I proposed above, we agree with Lessig that code is law, and we consider that the genes and memories that comprise our personal psychological network are our source code, well-tailored memes can change the source code of many individuals rapidly and produce new combinations and unanticipated results. We can see dynamic in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

It's now a banality that the interlacing of a computer network into human networks means that memes can spread further faster than in previous technological eras. However, it's important to note that this phenomenon is not just a matter of faster communication, it's also a constitutive process. After A shares information with B, information is transmitted. They are also now A1 and B1. As an Egyptian activist noted of the Egyptian uprising, "Before this social-media revolution, everyone was very individual, very single, very isolated and oppressed in islands...But social media has created bridges, has created channels between individuals, between activists, between even ordinary men, to speak out, to know that there are other men who think like me. We can work together, we can make something together." If we have a theory of self in which psychological structures can change based on context (rather than a notion of fixed character or personality), we might be receptive to the idea that communication changes not just what we know, but who we are. Our "source code" is different, and so the "rules of the game" are now different. In a sense, the law is different.

If we are interested in social change, thinking about our brains and our societies using the network metaphor generates some interesting strategic ideas. There are new, different ways to create change using words now. As the New Yorker relates, the original proposal for Occupy Wall Street emerged from the network-based collaboration between a man who lives in Berkeley, CA and a man who lives on a farm outside Vancouver. "Occupy-identified" groups have since spread around the world. The "Takriz" group which helped coordinate the Tunisian revolution began life as an email listserv and spread memes using Facebook. Both are examples of people who were not physically copresent, but who collaborated in shaping bitstreams of information that so appealed to other human brains that it helped stir them to passionate action, with significant real world results.