Our Distorted Cognitive Maps
Our brains now grow according to many distant experiences
Our individual human survival and growth depend on our short-term access to biological necessities — air to breathe, fresh water to drink, food to eat, and temperatures in which our bodies can survive.
Our brains grow their networks of memories and ideas according to the information that we receive from our sensory organs — our experiences. Our brains’ decisions about actions for us to take likewise depend on our experiences.
Throughout most of our history, our experiences were mostly very local to us in time and space. Since our invention of written languages, however, we have been able to receive information in limited amounts from distant places and times in the past, and our individual brains grown accordingly. We learn histories and other ideas that way and they affected our individual actions, which in the past were mostly local in their effects. (Producers of new written documents and inventions were exceptions.)
But now, with the internet, we have access to huge amounts of information from great distances via our visual and auditory senses, and we can produce similar information for other people at great distances to experience. The result has been that our brains can and often do grow as much or more from those distant experiences as from local ones…
