What shapes our sense of place, our sense of time, and our memory? How is technology changing the way we make sense of the world and of ourselves?
The human brain's ability to adapt has been an evolutionary advantage for the last 40,000 years, but now, for the first time in human history, we're effectively living in two environments at once-the natural and the digital-and many of the traits that help us online don't help us offline, and vice versa. Drawing on his experience of acclimating to a life of solitude in the woods and then to digital life upon his return to the city, Howard Axelrod explores the human brain's impressive but indiscriminate ability to adapt to its surroundings. The Stars in Our Pockets is a portrait of, as well as a meditation on, what Axelrod comes to think of as "inner climate change." Just as we're losing diversity of plant and animal species due to the environmental crisis, so too are we losing the diversity and range of our minds due to changes in our cognitive environment.
As we navigate the rapid shifts between the physical and digital realms, what traits are we trading without being aware of it? The Stars in Our Pockets is a personal and profound reminder of the world around us and the worlds within us-and how, as alienated as we may sometimes feel, they were made for each other.
On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy's finger hooked behind Axelrod's eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find, away from society's pressures and rush, a sense of meaning that couldn't be changed in an instant.
