The Effects Of An “Intense World”
Sarah Sparks, writing in Education Week:
“Futurist Juan Enriquez sparked a pretty lively discussion this past week in response to his theory that humans may be in a period of rapid evolutionary change in response to the exponential increase in information in our environment—changes that may be showing themselves in rising rates of autism, synesthesia and attention disorders.
Enriquez, the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, argues in a short book Homo Evolutis that humans are still an evolving species, and modern life exerts exactly the sort of pressure that can alter a population: ‘When you think of how much data is coming into our brains, we’re trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in, in a lifetime,’ he says.
He points to the skyrocketing rates of American students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders—from 6.7 per 1,000 children in 2000 to 11.4 per 1,000 children in 2008—as a potential adaptive response to an increasingly data-intensive environment. He bases this in part on the ‘intense world’ theory of autism introduced in 2007, which posited that autism may be caused by ‘hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory’ which ‘may render the world painfully intense.’
I’m not sure how much I buy that the expansions of autism or attention deficit disorders are caused by actual increases in the number of children who have those disorders as opposed to, say, better diagnostic tools and broader definitions for identifying students. But Enriquez is one voice in a growing chorus of calls for a different kind of research into special education, that goes beyond how to identify and integrate students with disabilities to really think about how to leverage their strengths in the classroom and beyond.” Read more here.
I think Sparks is appropriately skeptical here, but the larger point is worth thinking about: What does it do to children, and to all of us, to have this deluge of information sweeping over us at all times? Do we need to find ways to protect ourselves from this flood of stimuli? Tell me what you think . . .
The data point can’t possibly be true, unless you define “data” as “data coming from some place that is far off from your own environment.” People who live in hunter-gatherer tribes have to learn a simply huge amount of information about their environment, just to survive — the names and uses of all kinds of plants, ways of capturing all kinds of animals (and how to clean them, eat them, make leather, etc.), how to make tools, and so on.
Reminds me of a post I once wrote about a claim that was still over-the-top, albeit much less so: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2003/11/unsourced-factoids.html
I’m also reminded of a passage I read about Amazon Indians (I think it was the book “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,” a wonderful book about the Piraha) in which the author was marveling at how much information they were taking in from the environment — information to which he was totally oblivious. Smells, animal tracks, etc.
Or think of Pliny’s 37-volume encyclopedia Naturalis Historia. The average person today takes in that much information in a day?