In 1964 the writer Isaac Asimov predicted life 50 years on, ‘Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom....and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.’

In order to make the most of a culture geared to ‘serving a machine’, we need to harness insights from neuroscience to devise commercial and educational strategies where true individuality, and individual insight, can flourish, - indeed where creativity isn’t an outcome reserved for an elite, but is a realistic expectation for all 21st Century citizens. But where do we start, if we are to understand what an individual ‘mind’ is, in the first place? Neuroscience could hold the key...

Humans occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet because of the superlative ability of our brains, compared with those of any other animal, to adapt to the environment. Our brains become highly personalized post-natally by the development of unique configurations of connections between the brain cells that characterize the growth of the human brain after birth, personalizing it into a ‘mind’ that is in constant dialogue with the environment. 

Neuroscience can give valuable insights by offering a perspective at the level of the physical brain of how we might feel and think in unprecedented ways. If we are indeed anticipating more decades of long and healthy life than ever before, we need to understand, for example, the alleged efficacy of mindfulness at the level of the physical brain, the possible threats posed by the digital world to emotions and well-being, and then devise the best ways for optimising fulfilment of each individual’s potential. 

We live in a world of concern for a global social networking profile, a world of instant views and thoughts read out in a virtual stream of consciousness. It’s a two-dimensional world of only sight and sound yet offering instant information, connected identity, diminished privacy and here-and-now experiences so vivid they out-compete the real world of three dimensions and five senses. This new culture and way of life is unprecedented and as such, is inevitably having an unprecedented affect on each individual human brain. 

Nowadays the digital technologies impact on every sector of our professional and private lives, encompassing goods and services, insurance and risk management, the media, leadership, education and ultimately most of domestic and international policy planning. However, social networking sites could be transforming the way we see our own identity and relations with others; video-games may be having an effect on attention, aggression, and even addictive behaviour patterns; search engines could be impacting on how we learn and differentiate information from knowledge. 

How will our culture and life-style adapt to a premium on the arguable features of a screen–based mentality, - such as a craving for sensation, short attention span and diminished frames of reference? My suggestion is that individual adaption will take the form of a more child-like scenario of literal and simplified events/characters/images where premium is based on direct and immediate experience, - the world of Pokemon Go. Then there’s complementary question of how will culture and a new type of environment could develop a stronger sense of individual identity, reflective thought and the ability to make connections, - to join up the dots in a new way. 

The digital world is arguably, for many, an end in itself, presenting a parallel life-style that over-rides that of the real world, and on which many will chose to spend their time and money. But how might this powerful digital environment be turned into a means to a much more fulfilling end? In order to make the most of a culture currently geared to ‘serving a machine’, surely the answer is to foster creativity, novel thinking for everyone in both the humanities and the sciences.

According to Baroness Susan Greenfield, in order to achieve this we need to be able to devise an environment and educational strategies for converting the fragments of isolated pieces of information of the screen into an interconnected system of knowledge. Only by joining up the dots into cohesive conceptual frameworks, will original thought and individual insight be able to emerge and flourish. Find out more about Baroness Susan Greenfield here.