• 1 Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-year Investigation of the Mal (...)
• 2  Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1987, p. 712.

7With the second mode, and even more so with the third, the selective constraints on the degree of compatibility between representation and reality are weaker, if anything. Let us consider the representations developed from mnestic traces. Admittedly, if I wrongly recall that I can fly from my tenth-floor office – after all, false memories do exist1 –, and jump at once through the window to go to an appointment, my false representation will be punished and, most probably, definitely annihilated. However, this example falls within the pathological category, full of absurd representations, as illustrated by psychotic deliria. However, when in In Search of Lost Time, the Narrator remembers Albertine’s mole “at times on the cheek, at times on the chin,” to eventually recall that it was in fact just beneath the nose, on the upper lip,2 these representational strayings are without real consequence. Outside the pathological category, the representations pertaining to this second mode can more or less play with reality – and make light of it – without any selective effect on the bearers of these representations.

• 3  Wenfu Li, Xueting Li, Lijie Huang, XiangzhenKong, Wenjing Yang, Dongtao Wei, Jingguang Li, Cheng, (...)

8This is all the truer for the third mode. In this case, and still with the exception of pathologies, the virtually endless liberties my imagination can take with reality do not seem to have adaptive effects. Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, writing Anna Karenina or composing Organ²/ASLSP has no influence whatsoever on the fitness of our species. Incidentally, the act of creation,3 which is the major feature of the human identity, is based on these liberties.

• 4  Joël Candau, Anthropologie de la mémoire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 1996.
• 5 Fatih Canan, Ahmet Ataoglu, Adnan Ozcetin and Celalettin Icmeli, “The Association Between Internet (...)
• 6  Joël Candau, Mémoire et identité, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 1998.

11Contemporary iconorrhea is a topical example.4 It refers to the streams and floods of images that constantly assail us, via the media, advertisements, film, the Internet or augmented reality. This iconorrhea seems to transform our relationship to the present, the ever-quicker and exponentially growing diffusion of images contributing to both our getting bogged down in the present and a derealisation of what images are supposed to represent, a phenomenon occurring when one spends too much time on the Internet or playing certain video games.5 Iconorrhea would then result in an agnosis of the event – or to put it in Arendt’s words (1961), to the dissociation between thought and know-how – under the guise of a series of shots perceived independently of each other as deprived of temporality. It is also possible that it changes our relation to the past, since the condensation of iconic memory makes it harder to develop a semantic memory.6

• 7  Joël Candau, “Du mythe de Theuth à l’iconorrhée contemporaine: la mémoire, la trace et la perte,” (...)
• 8 Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect, New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2016.
• 9 John Brockman (dir.), Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net's Impact on Our Minds and (...)
• 10 Len Fisher, The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life, Philadelphia, Basic Book (...)

12This hypothesis of an attentional dysfunction resulting from an information overload7 is now regularly mentioned when dealing with the “Cyber Effect.”8 Within the contemporary informational technosphere, a vast amount of information is circulating, the majority of which is supposed to be accessible to every inhabitant of the planet, provided that they possess the necessary infrastructure and equipment (electricity network, Internet access, computers or smartphones, etc.). While most researchers acknowledge that these digital techniques profoundly alter the human experience,9 they disagree on the nature of this change. Some of them consider that it is a positive one,10 pinning their hopes in the emergence of a huge collective intelligence, but many others emphasise pernicious consequences of this revolution of information.

• 11 Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nasset, Anthony D. Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedi (...)
• 12  Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York, Norton, 2010.
• 13 Manfred Spitzer, Digitale Demenz: Wie wir uns und unsere Kinder um den Verstand bringen, Munich, Dr (...)
• 14 Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing and Lada Adamic, “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion (...)
• 15 Nils B. Weidmann, Suso Benitez-Baleato, Philipp Hunziker, Eduard Glatz and Xenofontas Dimitropoulos (...)

13For instance, Ophir, Nass, & Wagner11 have demonstrated that the people highly involved in multitasking – a characteristic feature of new media usage – are more exposed to the interferences of irrelevant environmental stimuli and inadequate memory representations than people who engage less in this type of activity, which results in a decline of the cognitive skills of the former. According to Carr,12 we process the large stream of information of the Internet in an incredibly superficial manner, which affects our attention and memory.13 Bakshy, Messing, & Adamic14 hypothesise that Facebook acts as a bubblefilter, which limits the individuals’ exposure to perspectives transverse to ideological borders. As a matter of fact, the Internet as a whole could have the same effect, to a certain extent, since the network is discriminatory against the ethnic minorities.15 This bubble of togetherness, of the “likes,” of what is identical to oneself, would reduce the experience of human diversity as well as the ability to imagine it.

• 16 Robin Dunbar, “Social Cognition on the Internet: Testing Constraints on Social Network Size,” Philo (...)
• 17  Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect, New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2016.
• 18 Jonathan Watts, “Tokyo Public Health Experts Concerned About ‘Hikikomori,’” The Lancet, vol. 359, 2 (...)
• 19 Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu and Frank C. Keil, “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet In (...)
• 20  Philippe Bihouix and Karine Mauvilly, Le Désastre de l’école numérique, Paris, Seuil, 2016.
• 21 Eugene M. Caruso, Zachary C. Burns and Benjamin A. Converse, “Slow Motion Increases Perceived Inten (...)

14According to Dunbar16, the quality of social relations and cognition on social networks is relatively low compared with face-to-face interactions. Aiken17 maintains that the addiction of some parents to mobile phones (nomophobia) prevents them from spending enough time interacting with their children to help them develop their non-verbal communication skills. Numerous researchers consider that a new psychiatric condition called hikikomori, which takes the form of a complete withdrawal of young Japanese from any social life, results from the proliferation of technologies and lifestyles they have induced in Japan.18 According to Fisher, Goddu & Keil,19 the opportunity to search for information online leads individuals to overestimate their knowledge (thus resulting in a bias of their representations of the world), considering their brain as way more active than what the brain imaging techniques reveal. The all-digital school may alter the contents passed on to the children.20 Lastly, these digital technologies are conducive to every manipulation of representations. For example, the very fact of changing the speed of images can alter the representation of an everyday life scene. Thus, Caruso et al.21 have demonstrated that watching a slowed-down video showing an armed robber shooting with a gun heightens the impression that the shooter intended to shoot to kill, in comparison with the same video run at normal speed.

• 22 Michael N. Tombu, Christopher L. Dux, Paul E. Asplund, Douglass Godwin, Justin W. Martin et René Ma (...)

15In short, we may no longer be able to represent the world, or not as well. This would result from the transition from an in-depth knowledge, which requires time and is necessarily selective, to a superficial knowledge, open to the four winds and thus very often blown away by them, especially because the attentional process goes through a bottleneck.22 If future researches confirm these pessimistic hypotheses, then one should rule in favour of Plato, who in the myth of Theuth blamed his contemporaries for being “illusion scholars,” because they would try to “remind themselves from the outside, by foreign impressions, rather than from the inside, by themselves” (Phedra 274b-275b).

• 23 Trey Hedden, Sarah Ketay, Arthur Aron, Markus, Rose Hazel and John D. E. Gabrieli, “Cultural Influe (...)
• 24 Joël Candau, “The Theuth Effect. What Does Culture do to Our Brains?,” Unesco Encyclopedia of Life (...)
• 25  I use this term to define the processual aspect of both culture and its effects on the development (...)

16Though proven, it is very unlikely that the phenomenon I have just described in the second part is universal. As always with human beings, this natural ability – attention – is indeed inflected by the inherently cultural nature of our species.23 In Phedra, Plato explicitly postulates the effect of a cultural invention – namely writing – on our cognitive faculties, an effect I have called the Theuth Effect.24 In this sense, one can hypothesise that depending on the considered cultural matrix,25 the proliferation of superficial representations at the expense of in-depth representations is then more or less pronounced. From the perspective of our representational abilities, there would then be conditions for cultural adversity and cultural felicity.

• 26 Daniel Nettle, “Beyond Nature Versus Culture: Cultural Variation as an Evolved Characteristic,” Jou (...)
• 27 David W. Lawson, Susan James, Esther Ngadaya, Bernard Ngowi, Sayoki G. M. Mfinanga and Monique Borg (...)

18Anyway, the idea that physiological, physical-environmental, socio-environmental and social adversity/felicity constitute relevant variables with regards to the factors influencing the anatomical-physiological, motor, cognitive, emotional, sensory development of an individual is widely acknowledged by the scientific community. However, one potential form of adversity or felicity is virtually never taken into account: the cultural form. What is more, simply raising the issue of a potential cultural adversity, and conversely, of a potential cultural felicity, triggers strong reactions. The reason for this is that in the majority of social sciences, including anthropology, “culture” is the object of a syllabus: all cultural matrices are equal, an issue regarded as solved forever and ever. It is the cornerstone of the discipline, even if some scholars, such as Nettle,26 wonder whether individuals benefit from cultural traditions or are oppressed by them, while others discuss “harmful cultural practices.”27 Most anthropologists embrace the principle of axiological neutrality, often rightly so. However, this results in the impossibility of considering the potentially harmful effects of culture on our ontogeny, for instance – as far as our present issue is concerned – on the development of this cognitive faculty that is our representational system. The dominant view among anthropologists is all the stronger than whichever cultural matrix is considered, it is often congruent with that of the people living in this matrix. In general, these people regard their culture as globally “good,” and often superior to others. For anthropologists, the prevailing view is that there is no such thing as a “bad” culture.

• 28  The issue of the dignity of cultural matrices is yet legitimate a posteriori. When dealing with to (...)

20With this hypothesis, I do not compromise with the axiological neutrality principle consisting in avoiding any presupposition on what these cultural matrices are worth in terms of dignity.28 The issue raised here is a different one altogether. It is that of the DV of a cultural matrix with regards to the optimal development, in a given context, of an individual’s representational skills. When the matrix fosters this optimal development, the DV is positive. When it hampers it, the DV is negative. From a programmatic perspective, it is the developmental efficiency of the cultural matrix that is to be assessed and obviously not its dignity. Let us now illustrate the variability of this DV with two cases of cultural adversity and two cases of cultural felicity.

• 29 Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Nazi Indoctrination and Anti-Semitic Beliefs in Germany,” (...)

21What can be the effects on our representations of a totalitarian cultural matrix, or one that is pervaded with misology, relying more on the category of emotions than those of reason and attention? Recent works help us answer this question. Voigtländer & Voth29 have shown that German people born during the 1920s and 1930s would show a degree of antisemitism two to three times higher than their fellow countrymen born before or after this era. For instance, they picture Jews as “a population with too much influence over the whole world” or “responsible for their own persecution” way more often than other Germans. Obviously, this is a result of the Nazi indoctrination – a prototypical case of cultural adversity – they have undergone during their childhood, and especially in school.

• 30 Michael Muthukrishna, Ben W. Shulman, Vlad Vasilescu and Joseph Henrich, “Sociality influences cult (...)
• 31 Jared Diamond, “The Tasmanians: the Longest Isolation, the Simplest Technology,” Nature, vol. 273, (...)
• 32 UNDP & RBAS, Arab Human Development. Report 2003. Building A Knowledge Society, New York, United Na (...)

22Talking about the totalitarian cultural matrices, one may wonder which open or closed societies – to quote distinctions established by Bergson and Popper – provide the best opportunities for the optimal development of representational faculties. It is a known fact that the very large and open groups are more likely to innovate30 than the closed groups which seem to hamper adaptive cultural evolution,31 cognitive risk-taking and tolerance to doubt. According to the 2003 report on development in Arabic countries,32 4.4 book translations per million inhabitants have been published in these countries over the first half of the 1980s (less than one book per million people yearly), while in Hungary and Spain, the figures for the same period were respectively 519 and 920 book translations per million people. If we accept that the translation of works is an efficient means of exposure to new knowledge and representations, isn’t the lack of openness in this field a criterion of cultural adversity?

• 33 Cecilia M. Heyes and Chris D. Frith, “The Cultural Evolution of Mind Reading,” Science, vol. 344, 2 (...)
• 34 David Premacket Guy Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?,” Behavioral and Brain Sc (...)

23According to several experimental works,33 reading works of fiction improves our ability to imagine the mental states of others and ourselves, a faculty called “theory of the mind.”34 It fosters the awareness of others and ourselves, both in children and adults. Engaging in reading, provided that the characters are deep and the circumstances different from the daily routine, leads individuals not only to infer what the characters of the story think and are going to do, but also to get emotionally involved. In this way, reading improves the explicit theory of the mind (that which is culturally acquired, not to be mistaken with the implicit theory of the mind, regarded as “pre-connected”) of readers, both from a cognitive and emotional point of view. We can therefore consider that a cultural matrix promoting this type of activity offers, at least with regards to this faculty, propitious conditions for its development, in other words conditions of cultural felicity.

• 35 Christina T. Zhao and Patricia K. Kuhl, “Musical Intervention Enhances Infants’ Neural Processing o (...)
• 36 Nina Kraus, Jessica Slater, Elaine C. Thompson, Jane Hornickel, Dana L. Strait, Trent Nicol and Tra (...)

24Let’s go over one last example. Listening to music from an early age improves the child’s ability to imagine the temporal structure of information as well as future events, not only in the field of music but also during speech processing,35 which is confirmed by other works.36 Enhanced sound environments consequently improve the individuals’ representational abilities. One can then argue that a cultural matrix with all of the involved individuals benefiting from an ambitious musical education program thereby meets a criterion of cultural felicity.

• 37  Joël Candau, “What Does Culture Do to Our Brains? The Theuth Effect: Cultural Adversity and Cultur (...)

25Interested readers may refer to other works37 for numerous, similar examples. Every one of them gives sound evidence that cultural matrices can have a negative or positive effect on the development of our representational abilities, and more generally on all of our cognitive, emotional, sensory and motor faculties.

• 38 John W. Berry, Ype H. Poortinga, Marshall H. Segall and Pierre R. Dasen, Cross-Cultural Psychology. (...)
• 39 Fabienne Martin-Juchat and Adrian Staii (eds.), L’Industrialisation des émotions. Vers une radicali (...)

26According to Berry et al.,38 the words used by the Cree Indians to define intelligence can be translated into English as: wise, respects, respectful, listens, pays attention, thinks hard, thinks carefully. These words are at the heart of what Crees call “good thinking.” In 2004, Patrick Le Lay, CEO of the television channel TF1, declared: “What we are selling to Coca-Cola is available human brain time,” a “mission” that this media, like many others, fulfils through what Martin-Juchat & Staii39 have called the industrialisation of emotions. What becomes of our representational activity when our attention is fostered by the Crees’ way of thinking, which on this particular point seems to offer conditions of cultural felicity? And when it is captured by television for the benefit of a soda seller, which rather seems to fall within the category of cultural adversity? To put it differently, what does culture do to our brains?