The End of Absence by Michael Harris

Author:Michael Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

• • • • •

Humans are not the only animals who behave in unproductive and irrational ways—and it may be easier to observe the arbitrary nature of our behavior if we look to another species first. Consider the three-spined stickleback fish. The stickleback is a two-inch-long bottom-feeder that lives throughout the northern hemisphere. From late April into July, sticklebacks make their way to shallow mating grounds, where the males, as in most mating grounds, get aggressive with one another. Male sticklebacks develop a bright red throat and underbelly during mating season; the coloring is a product of carotenoids found in the fish’s diet, so a bright red male, having sourced plenty of food for himself, can be seen by females as a desirable mate, and he can also be seen by other males as serious competition—the reddest male sticklebacks elicit more aggression from other males. The Nobel Prize–winning ethnologist Niko Tinbergen found, however, that male sticklebacks actually attack whatever piece of material in their environment is reddest. (Place a red ball in a stickleback mating ground and the boys go crazy.) They respond purely to the stimulus of the color itself and not to the fish behind the red. A neural network in the male stickleback’s head is triggered by the sign stimulus, the color red, and produces instinctive aggression on the spot.

What, I’m now left to wonder, is my red? What kind of stimulus derails my attention against my will; what ingrained tendencies do technologies capitalize on each time they lead me away from the self I hope to fashion? And are they fixed actions, after all? Or are these patterns that I can change?

In the wild, some species have evolved to take advantage of the fixed action patterns of other creatures. The North American cowbird, for example, will lay its eggs in another species’ nest, and its young are later fed thanks to the parental instinct of the host bird. Is it possible our more successful technologies have reached a point where they are expert exploiters of our own automatic behavior? The Internet’s constantly flashing, amorphous display is an orienting response’s dreamboat, after all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.