Psychological Neoteny

I was at the Pocono (Stowe) Coffee House this morning, multitasking between a "practice exam" and the NY Times magazine. Well, maybe it wasn't so much multitasking as it was short attention spanning, as practice exams are boring. Just ask Tedman.

The NY Times magazine was the "6th annual year of ideas" edition and had all kinds of interesting tidbits in it. One of which I want to talk to you about here - Psychological Neoteny.

Here for your enjoyment is a paragraph that explains what it is -

"The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the boy-genius, probably because a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous both in science and modern life generally. This is the evolution of ‘psychological-neoteny’, in which ever-more people retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages. Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults. A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. It seems that this adaptation is achieved by the expedient of postponing cognitive maturation – a process that could be termed psychological neoteny. (‘Neoteny’ refers to the biological phenomenon whereby development is delayed such that juvenile characteristics are retained into maturity.) Psychological neoteny is probably caused by the prolonged average duration of formal education, since students’ minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’. Since modern cultures favour cognitive flexibility, ‘immature’ people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone of contemporary life: the greatest praise of an elderly person is to state that they retain the characteristics of youth. But the faults of youth are retained with well as its virtues: short attention span, sensation- and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. Nonetheless, as health gets better and cosmetic technologies improve, future humans may become somewhat like an axolotl – the cave-dwelling salamander which retains its larval form until death."

I new it all along. Now I just have "science" on my side, and who doesn't like justification for everything they do?

As my 40 year celebration approaches, I will walk into Sligo's on Saturday with a bigger-than-ever grin on my face knowing full well that my fraternity like antics are actually an exercise in cognitive flexibility, adaptation and an expression of my boy-genius.


Axolotl out.