COGNITIVE APOCALYPSE
Gérald Bronner
(PUF, 396 pages, 2021)
***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***
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While we spend less and less of our time attending to our basic needs, thanks to technological advances, the human mind has gained a considerable amount of what experts call “available brain time.” Twenty-plus years into the twenty-first century, we might ask: How are we using the precious resource of our attention amid the gargantuan flood of information and content of all kinds that continuously inundates our screens? Are we devoting our energy to collectively addressing the many challenges of our times, or are we squandering it on trivial pursuits? In this clear and provoking synthesis, the sociologist Gérald Bronner compellingly argues that the way we use our minds and spend our attentional capital has become an urgent issue on which our future as a species depends.
In the first part of the book, Bronner celebrates the technological victory that has freed us from an array of traditionally time-consuming tasks and constraints. In the second part, he scrutinizes how we are actually making use of this newly available brain time. His assessment is sobering: More often than not, the information that captivates us is that which confirms our fears, confuses causality and correlation, reinforces our need to show off and compare ourselves to others, normalizes violence, and encourages us to prefer the immediate satisfactions of the virtual to the harsh confrontations with the real.
Bronner does not simply decry this “theft” of our mental reserves by what he calls “the deregulated information market.” He sees it as a “revelation of an hidden truth,” the cognitive apocalypse referred to in the title of the book: The digital revolution, far from having “denatured” us by subjecting us to alienating devices, reveals the deepest aspects of our human nature, our cerebral functioning, and our human propensity for fear, conflict, and sexual impulses. These “cognitive invariants” are not evils in and of themselves; but, when manipulated by digital capitalism, they risk plunging us into a civilizational collapse. Finally, though Bronner shares with the reader his sense of urgency, he examines the means for developing a positive use of our technology and our neurons for the future. We must relearn to “defer the satisfaction of immediate desires” and “tame the empire of mistaken intuitions.”
One of France’s most famous cognitive sociologists, Bronner is known for his masterful investigations into the many biases that delude our modern brains, making him a connoisseur of mental illusions and one of the best chroniclers of our troubled times. With a dramatic sense, deployed within reason, Gérald Bronner offers an original diagnosis of the crisis of our time, one that will not fail to challenge and stimulate the reader. Indeed, Cognitive Apocalypse forcefully encourages us to value our brain as a treasure as the current challenges facing humanity require all the collective intelligence available.
Gérald Bronner is Professor of Sociology at Paris-Diderot University in France. He is a member of the Academy of Technologies of France and the author of numerous books, including Belief and Misbelief Asymmetry on the Internet (Wiley, 2015) and The Future of Collective Beliefs (The Bardwell Press, 2011.) He has won several prizes, including the prestigious European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences. He is one of the main proponents of cognitive sociology in France and is known for his work on collective beliefs as well as for his involvement in jihadist radicalization prevention programs with the French government.