Our Shared Global Brain Is Degenerating—But We Haven’t Lost It Yet

We are defined by what we call possible—and by the limits we refuse to accept. Nature holds its own boundaries: gravity, biology, the speed of light. But the boundaries we draw from power hunger and greed are man-made walls we can choose to tear down.

Since June 13, 2025, a choice has stared us in the face. The Israel-Iran conflict is not only crashing concrete, steel, lives, and souls, but also hacking away at the memory cortex of a planet already struggling to remember its better self. If you and I allow this, our children will inherit a world that forgets what empathy, fairness, and restraint ever looked like.

Look around: the silence is deafening. It’s as if an invisible higher power has draped itself across continents, teaching good people they’re helpless and should shut up. That is the neural rewiring underway in our shared brain. And unless we fight for the synapses—the connections of trust, trade, science, art, love and simple human decency—we will wake up with a collective amnesia no therapy can reverse.

The world can do much better. Didn’t millions in the US vote to make America great again? bring the troops back home? help end the wars already under way? and be remembered as peace makers? Why are we suddenly involved in a nightmare war in the Middle East that could potentially spark World War III? We face a high risk of collective degeneration if we allow one of the world’s oldest histories and cultures to vanish. Early risk awareness and peacemaking actions are more crucial now than ever.

The Talent Engine at Risk

Iran isn’t just a producer of oil, saffron, premium pistachios, Persian carpets, and Oscar-winning films; it’s a world-class talent engine.

Over the past three decades, roughly 120,000 Iranians have settled in the United States, excelling in roles that span the spectrum—from bench scientists who publish thousands of high-impact papers, to innovators who create first-class technologies serving millions of people, to entrepreneurs who generate billions of dollars in returns for U.S. stakeholders. Every phone call, WhatsApp message, photo sharing, family reunion, return visit, and recitation of Rumi or Hafez sustains a living web that enriches the West. Cut the roots, and the canopy will die.

Despite years of sanctions, Iran produces the third-highest number of engineers worldwide.

The hidden economic engine: Iranian diaspora have launched or now lead Uber, Databricks, eBay, Dropbox, Code.org, ApplyBoard, and many more. Iranian universities have trained about 159,000 physicians, making Iranian doctors among the top five foreign-educated cohort in US and UK hospitals. They are crucial in American rural hospitals and the UK’s NHS. Iranian filmmakers have won two Oscars and a Palme d’Or; more than 600 museums safeguard seven millennia of Persian art. Two million village artists still hand-knot carpets that grace living rooms around the globe. Destroying the utilities that keep Iran’s heart beating would sever the very lifeline we all depend on.

One Heart, One Grid—Blow It Up and We All Go Blind

Every megawatt of power, every mile of fiber, every hospital or school—every piece of infrastructure or facility that is knocked out, tears a strand from this global web.

If Iran’s infrastructure is destroyed, the world loses irreplaceable gifts: the six-month-woven silk carpet that never reaches a Brooklyn showroom; the classroom in Mashhad where girls learn their first lines of Python; the wheat-genomics lab in Tabriz perfecting drought-proof grain; the oncology ward in Isfahan that keeps UK hospitals staffed each winter; the clay tablets in Tehran’s museum that record humanity’s first laws. None of these targets wears a uniform.

If missiles erase Iran’s infrastructure and facilities that bring people water, food, electricity, phone signal, internet, heat, and gas you don’t just dim Tehran’s skyline. You rip out a crucial strand of an interconnected global web. Break that chain and the lights flicker in places you never meant to hit: classrooms in Chicago, hospitals in Manchester, art studios in New York, and R&D labs in San Francisco.

Our Shared Brain Will Go Demented by Practicing Violence and Forgetting Humanity

Among all the structures that evolution layered onto the mammalian brain, the frontopolar cortex (Brodmann Area 10) is the most recent addition in humans: it ballooned only in our lineage during the last few million years, well after language and tool use began to emerge. Sitting at the extreme front of the prefrontal cortex, this region acts like an evolutionary “control tower,” integrating memory, emotion, and reward signals so we can simulate distant futures, weigh long-term trade-offs, and factor other people’s well-being into our plans. Its late appearance and dramatic expansion—far beyond anything seen in apes—make BA 10 the quintessential “new” brain area of nature’s design, enabling uniquely human capacities for empathy, moral foresight, and cooperative problem-solving.

Yet the extraordinary power of the frontopolar cortex is use-dependent: its synapses strengthen through sustained practice in empathy, fairness, and long-range planning, but shrink when life is ruled by fear or brutality. Chronic exposure to violence, injustice, or zero-sum competition bathes this region in stress hormones that prune its delicate circuitry, blunting foresight and eroding concern for others.

If entire societies allow such conditions to persist, we risk a slow, self-inflicted dementia of our collective brain—trading the uniquely human capacity to care and cooperate for reflexes little better than fight-or-flight. Strengthening the frontopolar cortex, then, is not merely a personal wellness goal; it is a civilizational imperative.

This Is the Hour—Pick Up the Phone, Light Up the Feed

History isn’t written by kings anymore—it’s written by algorithms that measure public outrage. Let's feed and flood those algorithms with our collective demand for wisdom, restraint, and peace.

• Call your representative, today. Say one sentence: “I oppose funding or supporting strikes on Iran’s civilians and infrastructure.”

• Flood the timeline. Post the simple hashtag #KeepTheLightsOn with a single reason why you care.

• Email a newsroom. Ask U.S. leaders not to get involved in the war. It will only escalate the conflict, dramatically increase civilian casualties, and risk it quickly spiraling out of control.

• Talk to your kids tonight. Tell them empathy isn’t weakness and silence isn’t neutrality. Make them part of the antidote before indifference becomes their default setting.

We Still Control the Narrative—If We Speak

When those same kids ask, “Where were you when museums burned and newborns died?” let’s be ready with the only answer that matters:

“I did everything I could—loudly, relentlessly, and with hope.”

Choose now. Your voice is a neuron in this global brain. Fire it, or let it die. The next flicker in the global network depends on what you do in the next five minutes. Protect the engines of shared prosperity. The next Persian carpet, the next AI breakthrough, and the next Oscar-winning screenplay are taking shape in villages, cities and laboratories today at high risk of demise.

Don't destroy Iran’s infrastructure. Keep the lights on. Protect the humanity that powers us all.