Enriched Environments, Delayed Brain-Disease and Neurogenesis

I wrote previously about Dr. Elizabeth Gould's work with marmosets showing that enriched environments promoted neurogenesis, while less complex environments promoted something more like a "survival state" of base functionality without neural development. I likened it to the general modern condition, and the modern malaise present in our society. It was a philosophical reach, not a scientific one, but it seems I am not far off...
Nature Reviews: Enriched environments, experience-dependent plasticity and disorders of the nervous system

Originally found here: The Frontal Cortex, Brain Diseases and the Environment (Note his comment on piblic schools.)

The Endemic Decay of the Modern Brain

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.

This Modern Life

Fifty years ago the world was a bigger place.
The size of the actual ball of mud, rock and water wasn’t any different than it is today (give or take a few tons of ore that have been hurled into space never to return since 1956, a truly insignificant thing to a planet), but it was a bigger place. And fifty years before that I was even bigger still.
So, you're probably asking, if it wasn’t bigger in physical size, then how was it bigger?
It was bigger in solely one fashion; The room a man had to live in it was bigger.
People could come and go as they pleased. They could live in the city next to their neighbors and with the immediate convenience of the close urban quarters, or they could live in the country and see no one for miles and miles around and spend days and days alone pursuing their interests. A person could make a living, living out - Be it off the land or off their works which they took into town once in awhile and sold, one could make a good living and remain as far from neighbors and the supposed "convenience" of the city as they liked.
Today the world is a much smaller place, and the universal consciousness is turned more inwards, into the city and the close knit urban vibe of it all. In the heads of most people is an idea, so subconscious it’s actually more just a sense, a feeling, that unless they are surrounded by others they are in dangerous territory. They want to have neighbors, they want the hubbub of modern living all mashed together right on top of their subdivisions and washing around their minivans.
You see this in how people drive when they get out on the interstate in between cities and towns. I live in a state with a, thankfully, fairly low population density, and there is a lot of wide open country between places, I do a lot of driving. And I see it. People coming from the city get onto the interstate and instead of finding a nice open stretch and maintaining their solidarity for a casual drive they get right up behind someone else, who is in turn right up behind another someone else, and they keep it up until you get these little undulating conglomerations of five to ten vehicles moving down the interstate, constantly jockeying for new but in no way superior positions within the herd.
They cannot, possibly, be alone. If you happen to come along one of these poor helpless creatures when they are alone, they will inevitably be driving quite slowly fearfully looking about or talking on their cell phones to someone back in the city about how "awful" and "empty" open country and open road are. Then, you will pass them in an attempt to leave their slow moving wagon of banality and despair behind, to maintain your oneness, your solitary leisurely place on the road. Suddenly they will speed up and will drop right in behind you, and stick there like they've harpooned you until they decide to pass, only to be in front where they can slow down lest they leave the "safety zone" of another human presence.
These people are "the people" anymore, they live, work, play and function as the baseline of society. Everyone else is a statistical anomaly. The mass consciousness, the one that drives marketing, trends in entertainment, fashion and everything else, the consciousness that writes the unwritten rules and guidelines of society that PTA's use to write rules and guidelines for the next generations and that are used to win (and lose) elections, is the consciousness of these "baseline" individuals. These people who cannot bring themselves to be alone on the open road are the society in America.
They want all the service, all the convenience, all the pleasure and most certainly all the profit and none of the responsibility. They go to work, they pay their taxes, and they want everything else to be guaranteed, insured and immediately available day and night.
They want someone to save them from fire, burglars, kiddy diddlers and flat tires. They want someone to insure that new laws are made to better "protect" them from fires, burglars, kiddy diddlers and yes flat tires. They want the supermarket shelves to be full, they want their skies to be blue, they want their neighbors to have nice lawns that compliment the Norman Rockwell picture perfect essence of their own front yard. They want it all, and they want none of the responsibility of getting it, maintaining it or protecting it. That is someone else’s job. The kind of person who would suggest differently is most certainly the same sort of horrible individual who would drive by themselves along those long open stretches of road.
But they are conflicted - The urban lifestyle with traffic and stoplights and fire departments and cable television and lawn care specialists and a gas station on the corner has them demanding and wanting, of course. This is the life they know, it is the life the consciousness of the nation is telling them is the good life and they believe in that message, and why not? It’s hard not to when it grows just a little stronger every day.
But there is another message, another signal from the universal consciousness, that is slowly being pushed out, its bandwidth decreasing - It is in fact dying, as all old things must. It carries the idea that land is a good thing to have, and that open spaces aren’t so bad, and the good life is having the land to enjoy the open spaces and be away from the maddening roar of it all. It is an idea kept alive by an older generation still working, and by a few rebels and radicals who, the urban dweller must admit when alone and contemplative, have some positive characteristics, a certain charm to their ideas of independence.
These two signals meet, and in a violent cataclysm the newer, stronger, signal tears asunder much of the older one and in the friction of such the ideas fuse. Out of this confusion comes the idea "We will live out of town, out in the country, but we will bring all of our friends with it and they can live out there too, and along with us we will bring all the conveniences of town". So they do, and pretty soon, "out there" has grown and meets up with town, and becomes just another neighborhood. Some developments, further out back of beyond, will take longer to do so, and some may become towns of their own, but in the end it is all still the same.
Those of us who drive alone on the interstate, we anomalies, who have lived out there since before there was anywhere else to live, are simply left to watch in horror as people who do not belong come and fill up our world, surrounding us and smothering us with their way of life.

There are places in the world where most people do not belong. Most people, and that probably means most of you who will read this, do not belong way out back of beyond. You don’t understand it, and cannot truly appreciate it, and you certainly can’t conserve it.
Such people are the teeming, screaming, masses who choose to live in the city, who choose not to break free of the disease of the mind that lifestyle promotes, and they are mentally incapable of doing good for the places where they settle when they move out of the city.
There is no equality between those people and people like me, people who understand and appreciate the land, and want the space and freedom it affords and are willing to live without the supposed "necessities" of city living to have those things.
In the end those whose blood burns for freedom (in the bigger sense than just what that old song with the bits about the bombs bursting in air talks about), and those whose mind is polluted with the fundamental ideas of the current social consciousness are mortal enemies.
But it is a losing war. There are too many people, and despite the ravages of disease, disaster and human destruction they are never going to go away. People will keep consuming, and destroying, and in the end yes the planet, that ancient organism of smaller organisms chained together in symbiosis, that old god we barely understand, will sneeze use off like dust in a cosmic nostril, but before we reach that end what hope is there for the man of freedom and wide open spaces?
He is an antique, a creature of the past, a reverse Neanderthal too smart and too capable for the "good" of society as society has deemed.