The Sword and Laser discussion

(Technically it’s an allegory, but I couldn’t come up with a pun using that word.)

I read The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power and in the chapter about Rome she talks about how scientists have discovered that our reliance on GPS and the like is literally causing our brains to shrink and our neurons to not fire, because having mental maps increases cognition. Those internal maps literally create more gray matter and foster connections in our brains.

There’s a scene in Marrow Thieves where our small group of indigenous characters occupy a hotel after weeks of sleeping on the ground in the woods. At first they’re very excited to have their own rooms with real beds, but then they all end up in the same room because they can’t sleep.

Insomnia has become a huge problem in the real world, due in large part to our addiction to our devices. At night, browsing on our phones and iPads, watching TV, etc., interferes with our natural mental processes. Just as an over-reliance on GPS shrinks our brains, our technology and modern life is altering how our minds work, causing physical and mental illness and other problems like chronic sleeplessness.

There is also the conflicting push-and-pull between being attuned to nature and experiencing the comforts of civilization, which is often singled out as a great disconnect for people who have had their traditions stripped away from them by colonialism and expansionism. That’s also a major theme of the book, to my reading of it.

The hotel scene works as a metaphor for all of that, which I didn’t appreciate until now. Not to get all crunchy-granola and woo-woo about it, but there is quite a lot of evidence that technology is counter to hundreds of thousands of years of homo sapien evolution, which is why we’re seeing these issues arise.

I don’t know if Dimaline intended these specific parallels or if she just intuited it, but either way it’s there, and it makes the story more effective.

it has not been many generations since the only way to create an artifical image of something was by painting/drawing. We spent thousands of generations as hunter/gatherers and not as the apex predator and those traits and neural constructs lie deep within us still

Hmm, I'd guess that my ancestors for generations would have been farmers.

I work with computers for a living, I'm working from home and sheltering in place from the pandemic. I set myself a resolution to go outside everyday (no time limit) and I don't do it most days.

Not the same as a hunter/gatherer, but if I was a farmer, I'd be doing hard physical labor every day and be quite happy to tumble into bed every night, instead of trying to drag myself away from the TV. I'd understand the seasons and the weather patterns.

Reading Trike's message makes me think that an additional message to TMT readers is how we're screwing up our natural rhythms - dreams as a metaphor for the distress in our unnatural lives.