The great rewiring

Picture this: You're scrolling through your social media feed when suddenly you encounter a post that makes your stomach clench. Maybe it's about gender identity, climate change, or economic inequality, something that doesn't just challenge your opinion, but seems to attack the very foundations of how you understand the world. Your heart rate spikes, your jaw tightens, and you feel an almost physical urge to either argue back or scroll away as fast as possible. What you've just experienced isn't just political disagreementt, it's your brain having a neurological meltdown. 

Welcome to the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of modern life: we're all living through a massive rewiring of human consciousness, and our brains are not handling it well. 

When reality breaks your brain 

To understand what's happening to us, we need to dive into the revolutionary work of Karl Friston, a neuroscientist whose theories about how brains work might just explain why the world feels like it's falling apart. Friston discovered that everything your brain does, from regulating your heartbeat to deciding what to have for lunch, is actually part of one grand project: building a prediction machine. 

Think of your brain as an incredibly sophisticated weather forecaster, but instead of predicting rain, it's constantly forecasting everything: where your keys are, how your boss will react to your email, whether that approaching stranger is friendly or threatening, and even fundamental things like "men wear pants, women wear dresses" or "hard work leads to success." These predictions, which scientists call "generative models," are literally how you experience reality. 

But here's where it gets wild: when your predictions fail, when reality doesn't match what your brain expected, something remarkable happens. Your brain experiences what Friston calls "free energy," which is essentially the neurological equivalent of static electricity. A little bit of this static is fine; it's how we learn and adapt. But too much, and your brain goes into crisis mode. 

Now imagine living in an era where the fundamental predictions that previous generations could rely on, about gender, work, family, authority, even the stability of the planet's climate, are being challenged simultaneously, constantly, and at the speed of light through our devices. We're not just experiencing prediction failures; we're experiencing a prediction apocalypse. 

But there's a darker layer to this story: capitalism has created the perfect storm for this neurological chaos. 

The perfect storm of stress and information 

Here's what makes our current moment uniquely volatile: most people are fighting just to survive economically while simultaneously being bombarded with worldview-shattering information. When you're stressed about rent, healthcare, student loans, or job security, your brain is already operating in survival mode. The cognitive resources needed for flexible thinking and model updating are diverted to immediate threats. 

Capitalism doesn't just create economic stress. It weaponizes our neurological vulnerabilities. When people are exhausted from working multiple jobs, anxious about their financial future, and constantly reminded of their precarious position in society, they become neurologically primed for rigid thinking rather than adaptive growth. A brain focused on survival doesn't have the luxury of intellectual flexibility. 

This creates a vicious cycle: economic stress makes people more likely to respond to information challenges with violence and invalidation rather than curiosity and growth. Instead of updating their models when confronted with new realities, stressed brains default to the easier option, forcing reality to conform to existing beliefs, often through aggression or denial. 

The great acceleration 

Social media hasn't just changed how we communicate; it's fundamentally altered the information ecosystem our brains evolved to navigate. For most of human history, the models our brains built about the world changed slowly. You might encounter new ideas through occasional travel, books, or conversations with neighbors. Your brain had time to gradually adjust its predictions, like a sailor slowly adjusting sails to changing winds. 

Today's information environment is more like being caught in a hurricane of contradictory data. Algorithms designed to capture our attention have learned that nothing grabs eyeballs quite like content that violates our expectations, the very content that sends our brains into prediction crisis. We're being bombarded with model-breaking information not occasionally, but as a constant background hum of modern existence. 

But this isn't the first time humanity has faced such an information revolution. Before World War I, societies experienced a remarkably similar shock. Rapid mass literacy, cheap newspapers, political pamphlets, and the telegraph radically accelerated how ideas spread. Information moved faster than social norms, institutions, and democratic practices could adapt. People were suddenly exposed to competing truths, new ideologies, and challenges to traditional authority. Much like today's social media landscape. 

This breakdown of shared meaning created uncertainty and anxiety. In the absence of trusted filters and common narratives, many turned toward simplified identity-based worldviews that promised order, belonging, and moral clarity. National conservatism emerged not as a rejection of modernity, but as a reaction to its informational overload.

The parallels to today are chilling. Social media plays a similar role to those early mass communication technologies, fragmenting reality, rewarding emotional narratives, and undermining shared epistemic ground. As before, when information systems change faster than societies can metabolize them, reactionary movements thrive by offering simple stories in a complex world.

Consider what happens when someone who grew up with rigid gender categories encounters transgender individuals living authentically for the first time through social media. Their brain, which had successfully predicted a binary world for decades, suddenly faces information it can't process. That person now has two choices: either update their model to include the reality of transgender people, or try to force reality to conform to their existing model by denying, dismissing, or even attacking the source of the contradictory information. 

This isn't just about transgender issues, it's happening across every domain of human experience. Economic models built on the idea that hard work guarantees success crash into data about systemic inequality. Racial models based on hierarchies encounter evidence of their social construction. Religious models face scientific explanations for previously mysterious phenomena. Each collision creates that uncomfortable buzz of cognitive dissonance. 

The two paths diverge 

Here's what's crucial to understand: we're witnessing humanity split into two fundamentally different responses to this cognitive overload, and the choice between them might determine our species' future. 

The first response is what researchers call "model updating" essentially, growing. People taking this path develop what we might call "intellectual flexibility." They become comfortable with uncertainty, able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, and skilled at revising their understanding when presented with new evidence. Think of them as mental gymnasts, able to bend and adapt without breaking. 

But here's the catch: model updating requires cognitive resources that capitalism systematically depletes. When you're working two jobs to afford rent, when you're constantly worried about healthcare costs, when you're fighting just to maintain your current position in an increasingly unequal society, your brain simply doesn't have the energy for flexible thinking. Economic stress makes model updating feel like a luxury you can't afford. 

The second response is "reality forcing". Trying to bend the world back to match their existing mental models. This is where we see the rise of authoritarianism, conspiracy theories, and increasingly violent attempts to make reality conform to outdated predictions. These individuals become like rigid trees in a windstorm — they may seem strong, but they're brittle and prone to snapping under pressure. 

Capitalism makes this second response almost inevitable for many people. When you're economically precarious and cognitively overloaded, the promise of returning to a simpler, more predictable world becomes irresistibly appealing. Authoritarian movements offer exactly this: a return to the "good old days" when gender roles were clear, economic hierarchies seemed natural, and change happened slowly enough for brains to process. 

This explains why we're seeing a surge in authoritarian tendencies and right-wing nationalism across the globe. These aren't just political movements, they're neurological responses to information overload combined with economic stress. They represent repeated attempts to revert to older, simpler models of reality when the cognitive load of constant adaptation becomes unbearable. 

The really sobering part? Neither response is inherently "good" or "evil." They're both natural neurological reactions to cognitive overload. The difference lies in which strategy actually helps us survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world and which system creates the conditions that make adaptive responses possible. 

The childhood connection 

Perhaps the most profound insight from this research is how it explains our relationship with children and childhood itself. The framework suggests that our culture's systematic mistreatment of children, what researchers call "anti-child ageism", isn't just cruel; it's strategically counterproductive. 

Children are naturally equipped with flexible generative models. Watch a five-year-old encounter something new, and you'll see the kind of effortless model updating that adults struggle with. They ask "why?" constantly, play with ideas freely, and adapt to new information with remarkable ease. But our educational and social systems, designed for a more predictable world and shaped by capitalist priorities, often train this flexibility out of them. 

Under capitalism, children are viewed primarily as future economic units rather than fully human beings with inherent worth. Educational systems focus on creating compliant workers rather than curious thinkers. This systematic suppression of natural cognitive flexibility creates adults who are ill-equipped to handle the very challenges they'll face in an information-saturated world. 

The tragic irony is that in preparing children for the stable world we grew up in and the economic system that demands conformity, we're handicapping them for the fluid world they'll actually inhabit. It's like training someone for a chess match when they'll be playing jazz improvisation, all while ensuring they're too stressed about survival to truly excel at either. 

Beyond the storm 

Understanding our current moment through this neurological lens offers something rare: hope grounded in science rather than wishful thinking. If our social upheaval is fundamentally about how brains process information under economic stress, then we can actually do something about it. 

The research suggests that people can develop more flexible generative models at any age, though it requires conscious effort and, crucially, the economic security to make that effort possible. This might involve practicing intellectual humility getting comfortable with saying "I don't know" or "I might be wrong." It could mean actively seeking out perspectives that challenge our assumptions, not to torture ourselves, but to strengthen our cognitive flexibility muscles.

But individual solutions aren't enough when the problem is systemic. We need to recognize that capitalism's creation of widespread economic insecurity actively undermines the cognitive flexibility needed to navigate our complex world. When people are fighting just to survive, they don't have the luxury of updating their worldviews gracefully. 

More importantly, it means completely reimagining how we raise and educate children and how we structure society to support that reimagining. Instead of drilling them with fixed facts and rigid categories designed to create compliant workers, we might focus on teaching them how to think flexibly, how to update their models gracefully, and how to find excitement rather than terror in uncertainty. But this requires a society that values human development over profit maximization. 

The historical echo 

The parallels between our current moment and the period before World War I should give us pause. Then, as now, rapid information acceleration collided with economic instability and social stress. The result was a retreat into nationalism, authoritarianism, and eventually, catastrophic violence. 

But history doesn't have to repeat itself. We have something previous generations didn't: a scientific understanding of what's happening to our collective consciousness. We can see the neurological mechanisms behind our social upheaval, which means we can potentially intervene before the worst outcomes unfold. 

The key insight is that information revolutions, by themselves, don't determine outcomes. What matters is the economic and social context in which they occur. A society with widespread economic security, strong social support systems, and educational approaches that foster cognitive flexibility might navigate information acceleration very differently than one characterized by inequality, precarity, and rigid hierarchies. 

The choice is ours 

We're living through what might be the most significant transition in human consciousness since the development of language or writing. The collision between our stone-age brains and space-age information flow isn't going away, if anything, it's accelerating with artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and technologies we haven't yet imagined. 

But here's the beautiful secret hidden in all this chaos: uncertainty isn't the enemy of human flourishing; it's the raw material. Every great leap forward in human culture, science, and art has come from people who learned to dance with uncertainty rather than fight it. The question isn't whether change will continue, it will. The question is whether we'll create the economic and social conditions that allow people to develop the cognitive flexibility to surf the waves of transformation, or whether we'll continue systems that leave most people too stressed and precarious to adapt. 

Capitalism, with its emphasis on competition, scarcity, and individual survival, creates the perfect conditions for rigid thinking and reactionary responses. But we can choose differently.

We can build systems that provide the economic security and social support that human brains need to remain flexible and adaptive. 

The next time you feel that uncomfortable spike of cognitive dissonance, that moment when reality doesn't match your predictions, try this: instead of immediately pushing back or scrolling away, pause. Take a breath. Ask yourself: "What if my brain is just doing what brains do, trying to update its model of reality?" But also ask: "Do I have the security and support I need to sit with this uncertainty and grow from it?" 

You might discover that the feeling of your worldview expanding isn't catastrophic after all. It might just be the sensation of growth, growth that's only possible when we're not fighting for survival, when we have the luxury of curiosity, when we live in systems that support human development rather than exploit human vulnerability. 

After all, in a universe that's constantly changing, the most dangerous thing you can do is create systems that make standing still feel like the only safe option. 

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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