There is a new theory emerging in the field of Neurogenesis (the study of neuroplasticity, the brains ability to grow completely new neurons and pathways) that says, in simple terms, that brains in deprived, stressed and un-stimulating environments stop neurogenesis, retreating into a sort of "survival mode" of basic functions, without growth.
A prime example of this is Professor Elizabeth Gould's work with marmosets. Marmosets kept in standard lab cages exhibit no signs of neurogenesis - Those kept in a rich, naturalistic, environment exhibit very active neurogenesis. The marmosets from the spartan (stressed) group when introduced into the rich environment begin neurogenesis anew very quickly. There is a fantastic, and more in-depth, article on this very topic (and Professor Gould in particular) in the Feb/March issue of Seed magazine, titled The Reinvention of the Self. I recommend it highly.
Neurogenesis and neural plasticity are subjects I am intensely interested in already, and I am giving serious consideration to directing my Psychology career along those paths. The Seed article refreshed my mind on the topic some, and had the gears grinding about it anew when I happened to watch the finale of the ABC television series American Inventor.
For those who do not watch TV (smart people that you are), American Inventor was a show where a group of four judges, made up of marketing experts and inventors, traveled the country interviewing inventors and viewing demonstrations of these inventions. From these hundreds they were supposed to pick a group of four finalists, to receive $50,000 each to further develop their product. Based on their performance the judges would select the single most valuable invention and crown its inventor the "American Inventor".
The guy who won invented a baby-strolled that if it tipped over had a freely rotating baby-bucket that would keep the baby upright and not spill the infant out into the street or down a hillside. An interesting, and probably very valuable, invention. But I found myself asking "Is this the best our nation can produce?"
We are not 150 years from the inventions of the telephone, the automobile, the airplane. We are not 50-years from the personal computer and space flight. And the best our nation can produce is a redesigned baby-stroller?
That’s when I realized - Most of society, in the first world as much as in the third and fourth worlds (they are closer than most people realize, small colonies of third and fourth world people isolated in the middle of the first world), is living in an un-stimulating, and highly stressful, environment.
For the first world, there are so many people, so many things going on at once, and in-fact so many sources of information and stimulus that people have become desensitized to it all. So many of the things that are going on are highly stressful as well, what does catch peoples attention is terrorism, economic stresses, war and extreme poverty.
For the "developing world" (such a nice term, makes it so much easier to ignore) the stimulation simply isn’t there. No money, no food, no water and as often as not extreme political strife (often in the form of civil war or genocide) keep those people bound up in a small world of limited contact, information and stimulation and a great deal of fear.
Then there is education - With a new generation being formed practically constantly education dictates how they will respond to stimulus. In the "developing world" education is a ghost of an idea at best - Even tribal custom and ritual cannot replace true education for those forced into that nebulous middle ground between the tribal community and global community. In the first world, education is simply failing. Education has become, and is ever more so becoming, a reflection of the en vogue political thought of the time - The substance of it is all but gone, because good education requires dealing with uncomfortable subjects, and that is culturally verboten. The education so necessary to expose the developing generations to knowledge, that basic foundation of stimulation and discovery is without that very substance, it is a meal without food.
The majority of people in the world are working, operating, in survival mode. (It is an odd correlation but Hunter S. Thompson suggested this in a speech he gave, talking about the failure of Timothy Leary's ethos - Thompson made the comment that "we're all in survival mode now". It tickled my brain, like a teasing taste on the tip of the tongue, there was a powerful idea there - I tried to write on it, read on it, and I just wasn’t thinking in the right ways, looking in the right places, at the time.)
Those who are not operating in survival mode make the effort not to - They make the effort to expose themselves to outside stimulus and see it for what it is (even without realizing the specifics), a means to better themselves, step above their current situation. They are out there, and they are numerous - but what is numerous in the face of a human population growing so much, so fast, that nearly everyone is displaced or disenfranchised in some fashion even today, where everyone is bombarded with either deafening silence, or a roar so great it becomes the new invisible, the new silence: Unnoticed and un-stimulating.