For better and for worse, we live in history's most novelty-oriented society, especially where information is concerned. Like the bow and arrow, the plough and the steam engine, our latest clever machines have changed the human experience. As University of Michigan neuroscientist Kent Berridge says, "The brain is up to the task of plugging into new stimuli and making them attractive, rewarding incentives. That's why, although we didn't evolve with computers, they're now able to turn us on and pull us out."
But not all of us have the same response to the new. What psychologists call "novelty-seeking" occurs on a behavioural spectrum, with most people arrayed along its roomy middle. These moderate neophiles, who have a well-balanced attitude toward novelty and change, focus mostly on those new things that help them to learn or accomplish something worthwhile (including recreation).
But 15 per cent of us are neophobes, hypersensitive and anxious about the risks inherent in new things. At the continuum's opposite extreme are the 15 per cent who are neophiliacs, driven novelty-seekers who crave excitement.
These tendencies are built into our temperaments and are hard to change. The hopes of would-be multitaskers notwithstanding, it's unlikely that our efforts to process the barrage of new stimuli that surround us will evoke a genetic change in the way the human brain is organized.
However, we're already learning how to adapt to the increase in information. Young people have raised their arousal threshold to the point that capturing their attention might actually require all those little compartments and flashing things on their screens that vex their elders.
As we move forward, some scientists foresee a new kind of evolutionary development that involves somehow meshing bodies and machines. Brain chips may sound like science fiction, but serious research by MIT's robotics whiz Rodney Brooks and others suggests that the idea is not so far-fetched.
"We evolved the brain's ability to take in, attend to, and sort information almost instantly," says Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Rick Potts. "But filtering all of today's electronic data is hard. A symbiosis between our neural, cognitive networks and our electronic ones has already started."
For the time being, the best way to deal with the torrent of novelty is to keep in mind neophilia's evolutionary purpose – to help us engage with new things that have value. Observing that TV commercials now use novel stimuli to arouse our brains and grab our attention every five seconds – in effect, training us, especially the young, to be distractible – Washington University psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger says, "You're going to be confronted with many stimuli designed to grab your attention and addict you, so you should be very careful about what you expose yourself and your children to. Everyone needs time for quiet, reflection and reverie. You have to achieve an equilibrium between those deep human needs and other stimuli, or you'll have problems."
Much of the best advice on how to live in a world of potentially limitless distractions boils down to two words: selectivity and moderation. Long ago, Gustave Flaubert offered, "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
Considering the brain's limited energy, Oshin Vartanian, a psychologist at Defence Research and Development Canada, advises asking some questions before engaging with something new: "Why should I take this up, if my daily scripts are doing a good job for me? Why exactly do I need another gadget? It will incur certain mental costs, so where will those resources come from?"
Our evolutionary past offers some valuable insights into surviving and thriving in a changing world. An environmental crisis nearly extinguished Homo sapiens 80,000 years ago in Africa, and we still struggle with devastating earthquakes, droughts and tsunamis, to say nothing of global warming. But neither of the dominant, opposing philosophies about how to handle these challenges stand up to the scientific record, says the Smithsonian's Dr. Potts.
Clearly the planet is inherently unstable, "so the biblical idea of dominion, which says that we control the world and can overcome all obstacles, just doesn't hold water." For the same reason, "neither does the so-called culture of preservation, which maintains that the Earth had an original condition that we're destroying. … We need a new understanding of how we evolved in a changing world, so we can get it right in the future."
Homo sapiens's condition is a poignant combination of singularity and vulnerability. "Our existence on Earth is remarkable – a new mythic story," says Dr. Potts. "The many other branches and experiments in being human are no longer around, and we too had our endangered moment." Perhaps thinking of our "exile" from Africa (Eden) and our struggles with violent monsoons that sound like Noah's flood, he says, "I don't want to invoke the Bible, which stands as its own mythic story, but there are certain convergences."
According to Ecclesiastes, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." But he never got to see men walk on the moon, or watch a movie on a tablet.
Reprinted from New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change , with permission from Penguin Canada. All rights reserved. This excerpt has been edited and condensed.