Things move faster than you think.
First, evolution: scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have outlined the way that the musculature in dogs’ faces have changed since they became domesticated. Specifically, two muscles around their eyes, the retractor anguli oculi lateralis muscle and the levator anguli oculi medialis muscle, are significantly different in domesticated dogs than in their wild cousins.
Those muscles, when flexed, allowed the domestic dog to make a kind of eye contact with human masters that wolves cannot. Their eyes now mimic the eyes of human infants, with predictable results when it comes to bonding.
Perhaps survival of the cutest is as important as survival of the fittest.
But what’s particularly interesting is the speed at which the change took place. It took something less than 33,000 years, which, in evolutionary terms, is a blink of a puppy dog’s eye.
This is all a way of saying physical changes can bolster behavioural ones quickly.
Check your phone — maybe there’s an email.
Just kidding.
But cellphones are modifying our behaviours and our brains, triggering addictive kinds of endocrine jolts that are almost impossible to resist.
And you have to wonder what else is changing.
This week, The Verge published a remarkable article about people working for private contractors as Facebook moderators — and about how the horrendous things they see online are affecting their lives.
They see, arguably, the worst of the worst of social media: the abuse of children; the abuse, injury and maiming of animals; all sorts of violence and mayhem that people try to post to the social media network, up to and including live-streamed murders like those from Christchurch, New Zealand.
This week, The Verge published a remarkable article about people working for private contractors as Facebook moderators — and about how the horrendous things they see online are affecting their lives.
Canaries in a coal mine, the moderators talk about how it’s left them with everything from sleep disorders to full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.
Don’t think it’s not affecting you. It is. Emotionally, for sure. And perhaps, like eye muscles changing in dogs, it’s changing us in physical ways, too, changing pathways in the brain in ways we don’t really understand yet. People exposed to violence in their everyday lives tend to normalize it. What’s more everyday life than opening Facebook? Interacting with others across the internet is vastly more persuasive than many of us really realize, which is why it’s such an effective tool for radicalization on all sides. It brings extremism to the most mundane and settled of worlds.
It’s remarkable how many people charged with viewing grotesque illegal pornography talk about how they moved deeper and deeper into violence and abuse because the thrill of early pornography faded.
What are we getting at here?
Simple.
When it comes to puppy dog eyes, you might not want to look away.
When it comes to the internet, maybe you should. Often. For your own good.
