they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build
the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species’ ways
of injecting noise into the system of cultural evolution.” “Noise,” of
course, is in this context another word for “entropy.”
“The child’s brain is extremely plastic, good for learning, not
accomplishing”—better for “exploring rather than exploiting.” It also has
a great many more neural connections than the adult brain. (During the
panel, Carhart-Harris showed his map of the mind on psilocybin, with its
dense forest of lines connecting every region to every other.) But as we
reach adolescence, most of those connections get pruned, so that the
“human brain becomes a lean, mean acting machine.” A key element of
that developmental process is the suppression of entropy, with all of its
implications, both good and bad. The system cools, and hot searches
become the exception rather than the rule. The default mode network
comes online.
“Consciousness narrows as we get older,” Gopnik says. “Adults have
congealed in their beliefs and are hard to shift,” she has written, whereas
“children are more fluid and consequently more willing to entertain new
ideas.
“If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks
like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.”
Or drop a tab of LSD. Gopnik told me she has been struck by the
similarities between the phenomenology of the LSD experience and her
understanding of the consciousness of children: hotter searches, diffused
attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little
sense of a self that is continuous over time.
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all
the time.”
• • •
SURELY THIS INSIGHT is interesting, but is it useful? Both Gopnik and
Carhart-Harris believe it is, believe that the psychedelic experience, as
they conceptualize it, has the potential to help people who are sick and
people who are not. For the well, psychedelics, by introducing more noise
or entropy into the brain, might shake people out of their usual patterns