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by Daniel Carlat. The same issue of the NYRB featured a piece by Sue Halpern entitled “Mind Control and the Internet,” which dealt with the following books: World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity Machines and the Internet
by Michael Chorost; The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser; and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Angell’s essay deals with the controversy about antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Celexa, and antipsychotics like Zyprexa, addressing findings from double-blind placebo studies. The first in a two-part series, the essay is a thoughtful review of axons, dendrites and synapses, and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in bridging gaps between neurons. Psychotics were at one point thought to be suffering from a flood of serotonin, while those suffering from depression were thought to be experiencing a deficit. Thus, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor would prevent the secretion of serotonin by the synapse. One of the issues Angell brings up is how neurotransmitters are affected by the introduction of artificial substances into the brain, a process that becomes particularly important when a patient goes off of a medication. What is curious is how Angell’s essay on mental illness and the interior working of the brain and Halpern’s essay on computers and the mind are linked. A significant development of advanced computational theory is the increasing connection between computers and the brain—the brains of disabled people are now able to manipulate computer cursors and computers are able to access the brain. In discussing Lanier’s theories, Halpern remarks, “The ‘hive mind’ created through our electronic connections necessarily obviates the individual—indeed, that’s what makes it a collective consciousness.” On the other hand, computer programs of the future herald a world of utter subjectivity. “Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of 57 variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology and assumptions,” Halpern comments. The subject that unites the two pieces is really consciousness, a theme taken up by John Searle in his review of Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
in the previous issue of the NYRB. One thing that becomes clear in all of these pieces is that the human brain is inadvertently being fought over by both computers and drugs. It’s a struggle of Darwinian proportions, with the evolution of the brain ultimately mitigating the outcome.
In the current issue of Publishers Weekly, Andrei Codrescu, poet, NPR commentator, editor of Exquisite Corpse, learned gadfly and now Luddite, urges his readers, in the style of a biblical jeremiad, to “Leave cyberspace. Go back to Ohio!” (“Promote This! Forget Facebook,” PW, 1/31/11). “Oh, but woe is unto us!” he exclaims. “The social networks aren’t selling books! They are giving away stupid prose for free!” Being friendly is not the way to sell books, Codrescu argues. “Not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.” For Codrescu, Facebook is not even a good place for writers to search for material. “Even if a novelist, let’s say, mined a social network for stories, he’d find nothing but lies and fake grins. There would be no smells and no skin.” Codrescu’s point about the one-dimensional view of human personality perpetuated in the pages of Facebook and other social networks is something that is also discussed by Zadie Smith in her recent essay/review in The New York Review of Books of the film The Social Network and of Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget
(“Generation Why,” NYRB, 11/25/10). Smith, who foreswore Facebook after just two months of status updates, writes, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Sensibility.” Bravo Andrei and Zadie! Let’s have a Fahrenheit 451
moment in which all the iPads and Kindles are burned, in which hedge funders short Facebook and in which friends parse each others’ essence through the complex characters in the novels they browse in their local independent bookstores.
