example, could some future embodi-
ment of a brain-to-brain network
enable a sender to have a coercive
effect on a receiver, altering the
latter’s sense of agency? Could
a brain recording from a sender
contain information that might
someday be extracted and infringe
on that person’s privacy? Could
these efforts, at some point, com-
promise an individual’s sense
of personhood?
This work takes us a step closer
to the future Nicolelis imagined, in
which, in the words of the late Nobel
Prize–winning physicist Murray
Gell-Mann, “thoughts and feelings
would be completely shared with
none of the selectivity or deception
that language permits.” In addition
to being somewhat voyeuristic in
this pursuit of complete openness,
Nicolelis misses the point. One of the
nuances of human language is that
often what is not said is as important
as what is. The content concealed
in the privacy of one’s mind is the
core of individual autonomy. Whatev-
er we stand to gain in collaboration
or computing power by directly
linking brains may come at the cost
of things that are far more important.
—Robert Martone
Western
Individualism
Arose from
Incest Taboo
Researchers link a Catholic
Church ban on cousins marrying
in the Middle Ages to the emergence
of a way of life that made the West
an outlierIn what may come as a surprise to
freethinkers and nonconformists
happily defying social conventions
these days in New York City, Paris,
Sydney and other centers of Western
culture, a new study traces the origins
of contemporary individualism to the
powerful influence of the Catholic
Church in Europe more than 1,
years ago, during the Middle Ages.
According to the researchers,
strict church policies on marriage
and family structure completely
upended existing social norms and
led to what they call “global psycho-
logical variation,” major changes in
behavior and thinking that trans-
formed the very nature of the
European populations.
The study, published last Novem-ber in Science, combines anthropolo-
gy, psychology and history to track
the evolution of the West, as we
know it, from its roots in “kin-based”
socie ties. The antecedents consisted
of clans, derived from networks of
tightly interconnected ties, that
cultivated conformity, obedience and
in-group loyalty—while displaying less
trust and fairness with strangers anddiscouraging independence and
analytic thinking.
The engine of that evolution, the
authors propose, was the church’s
obsession with incest and its deter-
mination to wipe out the marriages
between cousins that those societies
were built on. The result, the paper
says, was the rise of “small, nuclear
households, weak family ties, and ADRIAN GONZALEZGETTY IMAGESNEWS