As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars, and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems like we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with speed demons, alluring distractors, menacing highjinks, cyber-bullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information. But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. Like seeing icebergs without the cold, without squinting in the Antarctic glare, without the bracing breaths of dry air, without hearing the chorus of lapping waves and shrieking gulls. We lose the salty smell of the cold sea, the burning touch of ice. If, reading this, you can taste those sensory details in your mind, is that because you’ve experienced them in some form before, as actual experience? If younger people never experience them, can they respond to words on the page in the same way?
The farther we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by all our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature. I worry about our virtual blinders. Hobble all the senses except the visual, and you produce curiously deprived voyeurs. At some medical schools, future doctors can attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer—minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element. Stanford’s Anatomage (formerly known as the Virtual Dissection Table) offers corpses that can be nimbly dissected from many viewpoints, plus ultrasound, X-ray and MRI. At New York University, medical students can don 3D glasses and explore virtual cadavers stereoscopically, as if swooping along Tokyo’s neon-cliffed streets on Google Maps. The appeal is easy to understand. As one twenty-one-year-old female NYU student explains, “In a cadaver, if you remove an organ, you cannot add it back in as if it were never removed. Plus, this is way more fun than a textbook.” Exploring virtual cadavers offers constant change, drama, progress. It’s more interactive, more lively, akin to a realistic video game instead of a static corpse that just lies there.
When all is said and done, we only exist in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who work together to bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings, and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of our expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated, and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses, and combining emotional memories with sensory experience.
Once you’ve held a ball, felt its smooth contour, turning it in your hands, your brain need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. You can look at a Red Delicious apple and know the taste will be sweet, the sound will be crunchy, and feel the heft of it in your hand. Strip the brain of feedback from the mansion of the senses and life not only feels poorer, learning grows less reliable. Digital exploration is predominantly visual, and nature, pixilated, is mainly visual, so it offers one-fifth of the information. Subtract the other subtle physical sensations of smell, taste, touch, and sound, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving detail.
When I was little, children begged to go outside and play, especially in winter when snow fell from the sky like a great big toy that clotted your mittens, whisked up your nose, slid underfoot, shape-shifted in your hands, made great projectiles, and outlined everything, linking twigs and branches, roofs and sidewalks, car hoods and snow forts with white ribbons. Some still do. But most people play more indoors now, mainly alone and stagestruck, staring at our luminous screens.
I relish technology’s scope, reach, novelty, and remedies. But it’s also full of alluring brain closets, in which the brain may be well occupied but has lost touch with the body, lost the intimacy of the senses, lost a visceral sense of being one life form among many on a delicately balanced planet. A big challenge for us in the Anthropocene will be reclaiming that sense of presence. Not to forgo high-speed digital life, but balance it with slow hours of just being outside, surrounded by nature, and watching what happens next.
Because something wonderful always happens. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but snow, gathering thick and wet along the limbs of an old magnolia. Or, indoors, one may watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently when the furnace gusts. On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as steep in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive. Those sensory bridges need to stay sharp, not just for our physical survival, but so we feel fully engaged and alive.
A digital identity in a digital landscape figures indelibly in our reminted sense of self. Electronic work and dreams fuel most people’s lives, education, and careers. Kindness, generosity, bullying, greed, and malice all blink across our devices and survive like extremophiles on invisible nets. Sometimes, still human but mentally fused with our technologies, we no longer feel compatible with the old environment, when nature seemed truly natural. To use an antique metaphor, the plug and socket no longer fit snugly. We’ve grown too large, and there’s no shrinking back. Instead, so that we don’t feel like we’re falling off the planet, we’re revising and redefining nature. That includes using the Internet as we do our other favorite tools, as a way to extend our sense of self. A rake becomes an extension of one’s arm. The Internet becomes an extension of one’s personality and brainpower, an untethered way to move commerce and other physical objects through space, a universal diary, a stew of our species’ worries, a hippocampus of our shared memories. Could it ever become conscious? It’s already the sum of our daily cogitations and desires, a powerful ghost that can not only haunt with aplomb but rabble-rouse, wheel and deal, focus obsessively, pontificate on all topics, speak in all tongues, further romance, dialogue with itself, act decisively, mumble numerically, and banter between computers until the cows come home. Then find someone to milk the cows.
It’s been suggested that we really have two selves now, the physical one and a second self that’s always present in our absence—an online self we also have to groom and maintain, a self people can respond to even when we’re not available. As a result everyone goes through two adolescences on the jagged and painfully exposed road to a sense of identity.
Surely we can inhabit both worlds with poise, dividing our time between the real and the virtual. Ideally, we won’t sacrifice one for the other. We’ll play outside and visit parks and wilds on foot, and also enjoy technological nature as a mental seasoning, turning to it for what it does best: illuminate all the hidden and mysterious facets of nature we can’t experience or fathom on our own.
THE INTERSPECIES INTERNET
At the Toronto Zoo, Matt offers Budi one of several musical apps—a piano keyboard—and Budi stretches four long fingers through the bars and knuckle-taps an atonal chord, then several more.
“There you go! That’s good!” Matt says encouragingly. “Do a couple more.” One prismatic chord follows another, as Budi knuckle-dances across the iPad.
I’m reminded of the YouTube video in which Panbanisha, a nineteen-year-old bonobo at the Language Research Center in Atlanta, is introduced to a full-size keyboard for the first time by the musician Peter Gabriel. Sitting on the piano bench, she considers the keyboard for a moment, then noodles around on it, discovers a note s
he likes, then finds the octave and picks out notes within it, creating a melody that floats above Gabriel’s improvised background. Especially wondrous is her sense of musical timing, the negative space between notes when, neither rushed nor dragged, each note hovers in the air like a diver at the arc of a dive, before falling into a shared pool of reverberating silence, from which, at a pleasing interval, another note arises. After a while, she cuts loose and jams harmonies with his vocals.
“There was clear, sharp, musical intelligence at work,” Gabriel says. She was “tender and open and expressive.”
Her brother Kanzi came in next, and even though he’d never sat at a piano before, when he saw how much attention his sister was getting, “he threw down his blanket like James Brown discarding one of his cloaks,” Gabriel says, “and then does this, you know, fantastic sort of triplet improvisation.”
Gabriel finds orangutans the bluesmen of the ape world, “who always look a little sad but they’re amazingly soulful.”
At seven, Budi is still a kid, not a bluesman, and he enjoys playing memory and cognitive games on the iPad, or using the musical and drawing apps, but he’s most fascinated by YouTube videos of other orangutans.
Matt explains, tenderly, that he believes in offering orangutans a way to communicate nonverbally with other apes, including us. Keepers could always hand them things, but if the orangs “could tell anybody what they want, then their lives would get a lot more fulfilling.”
The most ambitious version of that desire is known as the Interspecies Internet. Matt has heard of it, and thinks it would be a cool thing to do, though the logistics might be tough. Ever since the 1980s, the cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, who studies animal intelligence, has been teaching dolphins to use an underwater keyboard (soon to be replaced with a touchscreen) to ask for food, toys, or favorite activities. She and the World Wide Web pioneer (and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google) Vent Cerf, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, are combining their wide-ranging talents to launch a touchscreen network for cockatoos, dolphins, octopuses, great apes, parrots, elephants, and other intelligent animals to communicate directly with humans and each other.
When the four introduced the idea to the world at a TED Talk, Gabriel said: “Perhaps the most amazing tool man has created is the Internet. What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces—visual, audio—to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with?” He told of his great respect for the intelligence of apes, and how, growing up on a farm in England, he used to peer into the eyes of cattle and sheep and wonder what they were thinking.
In response to those who say, “The Internet is dehumanizing us. Why are we imposing it on animals?” Gabriel replied: “If you look at a lot of technology, you’ll find that the first wave dehumanizes. The second wave, if it’s got good feedback and smart designers, can superhumanize.” He’d love for any intelligent species that is interested to explore the Internet in the same way we do.
Cerf added that we shouldn’t restrict the Internet to one species. Other sentient species should be part of the network, too. And, in that spirit, the most important aspect of the project is learning how to communicate with species “who are not us but share a sensory environment.”
Gershenfeld said that when he saw the video clip of Panbanisha jamming with Gabriel, he was struck by the history of the Internet. “It started as the Internet of mostly middle-aged white men,” he said. “I realized that we humans had missed something—the rest of the planet.”
If the Interspecies Internet is the next logical step, what will it be a prelude to? Gershenfeld looks forward to “computers without keypads or mice,” controlled by reins of thought, prompted by waves of feelings and memories. It’s one thing to be able to translate our ideas into the physical environment, but a giant step for humankind to do that with thoughts alone. Telekinesis used to belong only to science fiction, but we’re well on our way to that ascendancy now, as paralyzed patients learn to wield prosthetic arms and propel exoskeleton legs via muscular thoughts. These possibilities change how we imagine the brain, no longer a skull-bound captive.
“Forty years ago,” Cerf said, “we wrote the script of the Internet. Thirty years ago we turned it on. We thought we were building a system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system for connecting people.” Now we’re “figuring out how to communicate with something that’s not a person. You know where this is going,” Cerf continued. “These actions with other animals will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien species from another world. I can hardly wait.” Cerf is leading a NASA initiative to create an Interplanetary Internet, which can be used by crews on spacecraft between the planets. Who knows what spin-off Internets will follow.
Reiss pointed out that dolphins are mighty alien. “These are true nonterrestrials.”
The Apps for Apes program is but one part of our postindustrial, nanotech, handcrafted, digitally stitched world in which luminous webs help us relate to friends, strangers, and other intelligent life forms, whether or not they have a brain.
YOUR PASSION FLOWER
IS SEXTING YOU
Life takes many forms, as does intelligence—plants may not possess a brain, but they can be diabolically clever, manipulative, and vicious. So it was only a matter of time. Plants have begun texting for help. Thanks to clever new digital devices, a dry philodendron, undernourished hibiscus, or sadly neglected wandering Jew can either text or tweet to its owner over the Internet. Humans like to feel appreciated, so a begonia may also send a simple “Thank you” text—when it’s happy, as gardeners like to say, meaning healthy and well tended. Picture your Boston fern home alone placing botanicalls. But why should potted plants be the only ones to reassure their humans? Another company has found a way for crops to send a text message in unison, letting their farmer know if she’s doing a good enough job to deserve a robust harvest. Sensors lodged in the soil respond to moisture and send prerecorded messages customized by the owner. What is the sound of one hand of bananas clapping?
Plants texting humans may be new, but malcontent plants have always been chatting among themselves. When an elm tree is being attacked by insects, it does the chemical equivalent of broadcasting I’m hurt! You could be next! alerting others in its grove to whip up some dandy poisons. World-class chemists, plants vie with Lucrezia Borgia dressed in green. If a human kills with poison, we label it a wicked and premeditated crime, one no plea of “self-defense” can excuse. But plants dish out their nastiest potions every day, and we wholeheartedly forgive them. They may lack a mind, or even a brain, but they do react to injury, fight to survive, act purposefully, enslave humans (through the likes of coffee, tobacco, opium), and gab endlessly among themselves.
Strawberry, bracken, clover, reeds, bamboo, ground elder, and lots more all grow their own social networks—delicate runners (really horizontal stems) linking a grove of individuals. If a caterpillar chews on a white clover leaf, the message races through the colony, which ramps up its chemical weaponry. Stress a walnut tree and it will brew its own caustic aspirin and warn its relatives to do the same. Remember Molly Ivins’s needle-witted quip about an old Texan congressman: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day”? She clearly misjudged the acumen of plants. Plants are not mild-mannered. Some can be murderous, seductive, deceitful, venomous, unscrupulous, sophisticated, and downright barbaric.
Since they can’t run after a mate, they go to phenomenal lengths to con animals into performing sex for them, using a vaudeville trunk full of costumes. For instance, some orchids disguise themselves as the sex organs of female bees so that male bees will try to mate with them and leave wearing pollen pantaloons. Since they can’t run from danger, they devise a pharmacopeia of poisons and an arsenal of simple weapons: hideous killers like strychnine and atropine; ghoulish blisterers like poison ivy and poison sumac; slashers like ho
lly and thistle waving scalpel-sharp spines. Blackberries and roses wield belts of curved thorns. Each hair of a stinging nettle brandishes a tiny syringe full of formic acid and histamine to make us itch or run.
Just in case you’re tempted to cuddle your passion flower when you teach it to send text messages—resist the urge. Passion flowers release cyanide if their cell walls are broken by a biting insect or a fumbling human. Of course, because nature is often an arms race, leaf-eating caterpillars have evolved an immunity to cyanide. Not us, alas. People have died from accidentally ingesting passion flower, daffodils, yew, autumn crocuses, monkshood, rhododendron, hyacinths, peace lilies, foxglove, oleander, English ivy, and the like. And one controversial theory about the Salem witch trials is that the whole shameful drama owes its origin to an especially wet winter when the rye crop was infected with ergot, an LSD-like hallucinogen that, perhaps breathed in by those grinding it into flour, caused women to act bewitched.