The Past, Present, and Future of Communication

Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:

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Two neurons in a Petri dish trying to connect. This is what happens when a nervous system assembles itself during embryonic development. Each neuron has to follow a precise path to connect to the right neighbors in the right way. They navigate by responding to chemicals secreted by other cells. This is the neuron’s eighth day at a job that they will remain at for the rest of their lives, communicating. Once a neuron finds its spot, it connects to others via its synapses, then uses chemicals called neurotransmitters to control the electrical signals that it uses to communicate with other neurons. After some time, these neurons begin working together to start sensing not just each other but also the outside world.

We typically regard thinking and communicating as two different things. It’s natural to think of thought as something that happens inside a brain and communication as something that happens between brains. But when you take the point of view of a neuron, the distinction between cognition and communication isn’t so clear-cut. This applies to us humans too. If you look at the history of how humans exchange information—from the development of language to writing to mass media to the internet—you’ll find that the history of how humans communicate is also a history of how they think.

Let’s explore the past, present, and future of communication. Fossil evidence suggests that Homo sapiens, that’s us, first appeared around 300,000 years ago. But it was only around 40,000 years ago that important developments like creating works of art, using symbols, and practicing rituals started to appear consistently. There are a few sporadic examples before that, like 70,000-year-old carvings found in a cave in Botswana that suggest rituals and symbolic thinking. For the most part, it seems that our ancestors mostly just existed for about a quarter million years before it occurred to them to draw on a cave wall or make a musical instrument or wear jewelry—activities that aren’t directly related to survival.

Even then, once our prehistoric ancestors started engaging in these human-like activities around 40,000 years ago, it took them another 30,000 years before they organized anything you might call civilization. After that, things started to progress relatively quickly, but you have to wonder what took them so long. They had the brain capacity, they had opposable thumbs, they walked upright—what more did Homo sapiens need to become the monument-building, poetry-writing, symphony-composing, space-exploring superpower of a species that we are today?

Scientists don’t know exactly what, if anything, changed inside our ancestors’ brains, but perhaps the most important changes were what happened outside our brains. Beginning around 70,000 years ago, waves of humans migrated out of Africa, first populating Asia and Australia, and then settling in Europe starting around 50,000 years ago. As the world started getting more crowded, the pace of technology accelerated, and trade networks expanded. Interestingly, humans probably became a lot nicer. If you compare fossils of human skulls over the years, you’ll notice that their faces look flatter. This is what happens to mammals when they are domesticated. Some anthropologists argue that as population density rose and the likelihood of interactions with different groups increased, social pressures started to favor genes that predispose people to be more laid-back and socially tolerant when encountering strangers. Over successive generations, the prevalence of the strong, silent, and explosively violent type gave way to a somewhat less brawny, more sociable, and relatively laid-back type.

But the shift from violence to a more relaxed demeanor was fueled by one new skill in particular: speech. Until about 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens couldn’t voice all the sounds that humans can produce today. Around the same time, our faces started flattening and our jaws shrinking, allowing our tongues to move back and downward into the pharynx, making it much easier for us to speak like modern humans do. Many linguists think that the human brain is hardwired with unique systems for processing language, although they disagree over exactly what those systems are. What seems clear is that human brains and human languages are remarkably well matched for each other. Immersing a brain in a sea of language creates a fertile environment for that brain to exercise its intelligence, and for our species, that was a game changer.

Writing seems to have been invented independently several times. The earliest known writing systems arose in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in the 31st century BC, called cuneiform. It was inscribed on clay tablets using a stylus. Scholars think that cuneiform evolved from trading livestock and other commodities. People in other farming communities developed similar systems. Writing accelerated humanity’s accumulation of knowledge. A society that adopts the written word eventually gains access to the wisdom of previous generations, even those from other societies. But writing isn’t just for storing long-term memories; it also helps us think. A pen and paper, or a stylus and a clay tablet, can ease the load on your working memory—the information that you actively hold in your mind to keep track of what you’re doing. Like language, writing structures how we think. When we write down our thoughts using words, it forces them into a linear order. Writing facilitates collaboration; it transforms your thoughts into an object that you can share with others, perhaps giving them an opportunity to improve upon it. With writing, ideas that are separated by vast amounts of distance or time can be compared, linked, and combined into new ones. The advent of writing systems enabled our ancestors to think together far more efficiently.

Human brains didn’t undergo any major anatomical changes, but human communities were becoming vastly more capable of meeting people’s needs. The pace of technological innovation began to accelerate, and prehistory became recorded history. Things really began to speed up when the electric telegraph was invented in the mid-1800s. By 1861, it became possible to send a telegraph from the East Coast to the West Coast. Now news could be transmitted almost instantaneously. Britain soon became a global telecommunications hub, with the British government running cables to various countries. As the telegraph grew in popularity, inventors began to wonder if it was possible to transmit a human voice over electrical cables. The exact origins of the telephone remain controversial, with no clear consensus on whether credit goes to Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, or perhaps even to the Italian-American inventor Antonio Meucci. The reality is that the telephone didn’t come from a single human mind; inventions like the telegraph, the printing press, paper, writing, and language itself arose from a network of connections between people, the material environment, and their culture.

People adopted the telephone at astonishing speed. By 1900, there were 356,000 telephones in the United States—fewer than one for every 45 households. By 1920, that number had grown to 27.8 million—more than one phone for every three households. The telephone’s entry into the modern home was soon followed by the radio, and after World War II, the television. The era of broadcast media had begun. Around the same time that most Americans were purchasing their first TV sets, scientists were making strides in developing a new technology that would soon alter the course of human history. The first electronic computers were built in the 1930s and were essentially oversized calculators. During World War II, Allied Forces’ attempts to decipher enemy transmissions, calculate ballistic trajectories, and develop nuclear weapons spurred rapid advances in technology. By 1945, American engineers developed the world’s first programmable electronic general-purpose computer, which was called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The press referred to it as a “magic brain.”

In the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense was working on a way to get computers to communicate with each other. Established in 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a set of shared communication standards that are still in use today. ARPANET expanded over the course of the 1970s and early 80s, establishing links with local area networks at research institutions in the U.S. and overseas. In 1984, the National Science Foundation connected its network to ARPANET, turning it into a network of networks, or what computer scientists call an “internet work,” or “Internet” for short. The internet became commercialized and privatized over the next 10 years as the original ARPANET and the NSF Network were decommissioned, and as cable and telecom companies began providing regional and local access.

Using the internet in the 1980s typically meant locating files in a structured directory and downloading them one by one. That changed with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. On the web, any page can link to any other page, leading to far more useful and complex relationships between different pieces of information than you would find in a hierarchical structure. After language emerged, our ancestors’ ability to freely rearrange sounds led to an explosion of new concepts in societies that developed alphabets. The ability to rearrange symbols for sounds led to a democratization of reading and writing. A similar phenomenon happened—and is still happening—on the web. Having unconstrained connections between pages enables the network to grow without any need for central management.

The number of people online began to grow dramatically beginning in 1995, increasing from about 40 million users to nearly 400 million in five years. Today, there are more than 4.5 billion people online—about 60 percent of the global population. It’s difficult to overstate the internet’s impact on humanity. In the span of three decades, it has radically transformed our economies, political systems, news media, and social lives. Like language, the internet has massively reorganized humanity’s cognitive resources. What began as a project for linking computers together is now a project of linking brains together via computers. Normally, information travels along these links via not just internet cables and wireless networks, but also computer screens, the user’s eyes, the user’s fingers, and a keyboard. But not always, because neurons, like computers, send information with electrical signals. It’s possible to bypass the standard user interface and connect directly to the nervous system.

Beginning in the 1960s, scientists began successfully helping stroke victims walk with a portable device that delivered electrical stimulation to a nerve in the leg. This was the first neuroprosthetic. Since then, scientists have developed a variety of solutions to help people with disabilities replace missing biological functions with machines. The most successful of these is the cochlear implant. Unlike hearing aids, which simply amplify sound, modern cochlear implants bypass the hearing mechanism in the ear and connect directly to auditory nerves. There are currently about 1 million people using cochlear implants in the world today. The same principles can be used not just for sensory inputs but for motor outputs. In 2004, scientists implanted an electrode array into the motor cortex of a brain belonging to a man who had been paralyzed from the shoulders down, enabling him to move a mouse cursor and open and close a robotic hand just by thinking about it.

But this technology is a two-way street. Just as signals sent from the brain’s motor cortex to a computer can flex a robotic hand, signals sent from a computer to the brain’s motor cortex can flex a human hand. This was demonstrated in 2013 when a pair of researchers at Washington University, wearing swim caps fitted with electrodes that measure electrical activity in the brain, linked their brains together over the internet. One researcher was able to make the other person’s finger twitch simply by thinking about moving his own finger. Elon Musk’s Neuralink team is designing a neural implant that will let human users control a computer or mobile device using just their brain. The technology involves the insertion of micron-scale threads into areas of the brain that control movement. Each thread will contain numerous electrodes that will connect them to an implanted device that processes, stimulates, and transmits brain signals.

Neuroprosthetics and brain-computer interfaces have tremendous potential to help people compensate for disabilities. This rapidly expanding field of medical science will likely change how millions of people interact with the rest of the world. Perhaps one day, brain-computer interfaces could progress to the point that human brains would be able to control more than just a keyboard and cursor. Large-scale adoption of brain interface technology would change how quickly the world communicates. Being able to send a direct message from one brain to another would allow for incredibly intimate and immediate communication. But it’s important to remember that even without brain implants, we are all more connected today than ever before in human history. Lowering the latency between sharing our innermost thoughts with the world at large is only as important as the thoughts we choose to put out there.

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This version removes any inappropriate or extraneous content while maintaining the core message and information from the original transcript.