This is a book about the neuroscience of identity, written by an acknowledged expert in the field, who has recently sparked a debate about the effect of internet use on children’s brains. In the book itself, along with by now standard neuroscientific explanations of such phenomena as addiction, compulsion, mental illness and creativity in terms of neurotransmitters and neural connectivities, the author raises a specific concern in relation to the increasing intrusion of screen technology into the lives of children, leading to the formation of radically new ‘identities’.

In a sense though, Greenfield is herself part of the problem she describes. Like most neuroscientists, as an ultra-materialist she declares: ‘There is no separate “you” apart from all your neurons’ (p49). She acknowledges this unsolved conundrum: ‘will we ever grasp how that holistic operation [of the brain-mind] actually translates into that subjective feel of the moment we call consciousness’? (p79). This she emphasises is the ‘hard problem’ – ‘how the water of brain events is turned into the wine of subjective conscious experience’ (p196). Later on she decribes consciousness as being like a dimmer switch. ‘I speculate you can have more or less of it: consciousness will grow as brains grow’ (p127). Her basic proposition is that neuronal connectivity equals our personalised identity or lack of it. And it is the possibility of substantial lack, or hollowing out of identity by screen culture that concerns the author.

Notions of identity came to the fore historically at roughly the same time as the novel, at a time of huge social change in the 18th century. At that time, ideas about identity begin to be linked to narrative and the privacy of the self or the ‘nner world’. There were three interrelated preoccupations. Firstly the subjective/objective split. Secondly, the idea of life understood as narrative - past, present and future. Thirdly, the fascination with consciousness and reflexive self-consciousness. These essentially are what constitutes ‘being human’ for over three centuries.  Our concern should be that this modern selfhood is being eroded by databanks and the many technological encroachments on the privacy of our inner world.

For the purposes of her argument, Greenfield identifies four contemporary identities – being Somebody, Nobody, Anybody, and, finally, being creative. The Somebody is a person who is preoccupied with status in a ruthless capitalist economy. But the burden of the argument developed by Greenfield, concerns the Nobody scenario. We are in danger of becoming a Nobody because we are the passive recipients of screen culture for up to 8.5 hours a day. And this culture consists of rapid flux, bite knowledge and half-formed ideas. In the absence of authorised authorites, Truth is assembled by audience.

Children born since the early 1990s have grown up thinking that these new technologies have always existed. They have known nothing different and the danger will be that of growing up with no pre-existing conceptual framework, there will be a loss of the capcity to use and understand metaphor. In other words, with the loss of abstract ideas how can such concepts as, for instance, democracy, honour or soul, be understood using merely icons, images or multi-media? Open ended questions will not occur in the immediate here and now world of the screen. Menus with a fixed number of options may be rigorously logical, but impose themselves on the thinking process, tending to exclude thinking laterally – tending to exclude thinking as such.  Multimedia presentations discourage reflection.

Greenfield refers to Sue Palmer’s Toxic Childhood. Children of the screen are dominated by immediate sensory and especially visual imputs, rather than content. They will inevitably tend to regress and not be able to focus on others’ needs and not be able to defer gratification, remaining trapped in childhood. Unable to think metaphorically and operating without checks and balances, reality can blur with fantasy to an alarming degree. Without the corporeal presence of the other, there is no comparing past conversation, thought or event. Instead, the screen world is frightening, exciting, unpredictable and above all emotionally charged. It is a world of immediate response rather than one of reflective inituition or real understanding. The activites that fostered learning and identity formation the the past, namely, repetition and physical exercise, both of which encourage neuron development, are less in evidence. The increasing ‘reality’ of games, linked to TV shows or console games encourage us to take the world at face value with no questioning. Sherry Turkle, author of The Second Self , spoke of her daughter seeing a jellyfish and saying with amazement: ‘Isn’t it realistic?’

In the cyber-world, everything is a game where no one feels pain, gets shot, or dies. In the human world, a here and now thrill would have been balanced by the mind’s learned ability to create an unfolding narrative of the situation. But if the pre-frontal cortex is suppressed for whatever reason, or if the sensation and the sensational is stronger and repeated more often, a here-and-now mentality will dominate. Under-functioning of the prefrontal cortex is linked to excessive risk taking, schizophrenia, obesity, sleep deprivation, and the world of early childhood.

Greenfield notes that the multimedia preoccupation with ‘interactivity’ is only in its earliest developmental stages. Google will soon be ‘wrap-around’, giving us warnings and statements, but no conversation. ‘The critical issue facing us’, suggests Greenfield, ‘will be how to make the transition from the old question-rich, answer poor environment of the twentieth-century classroom to making sense of – indeed surviving in - the current question-poor answer rich environment…’ (p189). The major shift is from ‘slow content’ to ‘fast process’, ‘and it is this process that has an appeal all to itself’ (p194), thus becoming self-perpetuating. Computer games are attractive over and against the real world of complexity, imperfection, irrationality and other people with their hidden agendas.

The specific key to the identity shift is the experience of pleasure itself. Sensory laden euphorias, the jogger’s ‘high’ facilitated by the release of endorphins gives you a sensational time, and the ‘personalised mind’ with its infinity of connections developed through life, is temporarily suspended – you lose your mind. Very different from the notion of reward, pleasure is immediate whereas reward is delayed. Reward is based on your actions. It is a series of steps, a narrative requiring thinking set within a pre-existing set of values giving the end reward meaning and significance. Pleasure, on the other hand, is linked to addiction. Neuroscience indicates that Dopamine accumulates in the nucleus accumbens which connects directly to the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released into the prefrontal cortex by the action of addictive drugs dampens down the personalied mind, prioritising the here-and-now, shifting the balance from the significance or meaning of the action to the process of the action itself, which becomes pleasurable and therefore addictive in itself alone, uncontested and without checks from the larger mind.

What Greenfield emphasises is that the personalisation of the brain through its plasticity builds up a unique conceptual framework which becomes our unique identity. Anything that impairs these connections – dementia, drugs, a fast-paced environment with strong sensory imputs, threatens the mind altogether, with ‘human nature…obliterated in favour of a passive state reacting to a flood of incoming sensations – a “yuk and wow” mentality…where personalised brain connectivity is either not functional or absent altogether’ (p203).

Another ‘identity’ that should concern us is the Anyone identity, belonging to fundamentalist movements which by definition negate the private inner world of the individual. Here ‘long term potentiation’ (LTP) is used for the purposes of religious indoctrination. LTP depends upon both emotional intensity and frequency of arousal in religious rituals, thus creating a believing brain that tends to be rigid and not open to new ideas.

Greenfield’s formula is as follows: ‘Someone - offers individuality without fulfilment; Anyone - fulfilment without individuality; Nobody - neither individuality nor fulfilment’. (p254). Her tentative antidote to these (degraded) identities is to foster ordinary creativity and inner autonomy. However, the inexorable drift is towards a society where there are no longer separate individuals because bio- and nano-technologies will wipe our traditional demarcations of the body versus external reality. Instead, we are developing third party access to our innermost bodily processes, the homogenisation of generations via health, appearance and reproduction.

True, life becomes more intense, more fun and more comfortable overall, but with less and less meaning. Another paradigm shift is from owning goods to using services. Above all, we want services that provide feelings and sensations. Branding is relying more and more on the ‘experience’ each brand provides, of wellbeing, pleasure or contentment. What will be left is, ‘a life lived out of the context of a sequential narrative: nothing less than the demise of a life-story’ (p281). The prospect Greenfield outlines is the loss of a conceptual framework, of a capacity to evaluate current experience against ideas gained by reading books. Instead, we live in an answer rich world but are increasingly unable to pose significant questions. It is indeed an irony that just at the time when the whole world opens itself, offers itself as a ‘noosphere’, more and more individuals will not have the depth conceptual capacity to benefit from it.

The gradual erosion of the conceptual world, the sequential narrative, has been paralleled by the larger scale loss of the metanarratives that sustained us. However, Greenfield’s book steers clear of this broader philosophical domain. So when the asks in the final pages, ‘If neuroscience can so deconstruct, analyse and understand the human mind as to enable meaningful manipulation of the environment, might we be robbing successive generations of that most precious attribute of the individual, Free Will’?

Neuroscience is part and parcel of the post-human world that Greenfield is describing without herself using this term. In fact, neuroscience is at the heart of just this deconstruction, or the merging of the brain-mind (the supercomputer), with integrated technologies devoid of transcendence, devoid of mystery. For what else is a narrative if it not predicated upon the void that subtends it? Remove this veiled void and that is the end of narration. Narration is replaced by information. Barely perceptible within this text is the guilt of the neuroscientist for destroying the world and ushering in the post-human.