It was just one sentence in the book Blubberland, a reference to a publication called The Third Culture. I was curious, so I went to the site, www.edge.org. Maintained by Edge Foundation, Inc., the content consists primarily of original essays published by a coterie of scientists, philosophers, and others on a variety of provocative subjects. The publication title refers to C.P. Snow’s 1959 book, The Two Cultures, in which he placed literary intellectuals and scientists at opposite poles. The site predicts that the scientific community will be the new intellectuals to whom we turn as they make “visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are”.

Move past the self-promotion of the introductory pages, and many of the essays are intriguing. The feature that caught my attention is called World Question Center. Each January the editors invite a group of contributors to think critically about questions such as “What is your dangerous idea?” and “What have you changed your mind about, and why?” The 2009 question is “What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

A computer scientist at UC Berkeley predicts the decline in text (because we are disinclined to read); other writers consider possible environmental, political, and economic futures. University of Pennsylvania Professor Martin Seligman foresees more intelligent humans in our near future as we teach people to develop their intuitive abilities and to use that intuition as a part of normal problem-solving. Psychologist Roger Schank muses about wisdom reborn through what he calls just in time storytelling; developing a mechanism to share important stories in a global world where our neighbor is not really next door. He believes that we will better harness technology to allow us to more effectively mine the collective wisdom that already exists.

Harvard Professor Stephen Kosslyn’s “Leveraging Difference” is one of the essays to which I kept returning. He reminds us that while humans hold much in common, neural distinctions result in very different ways of thinking and acting. Kosslyn suggests that we acknowledge and capitalize upon those individual differences to increase effectiveness in different dimensions of our lives. He visualizes a process that will result in periodic tables of the mind - personalized charts indicating what we know and how we learn it - to aid in designing teaching strategies for the classroom, models for teams with complementary skills for the workplace, protocols for working with clients and patients, guidelines for style and content in communications, etc. Instead of operating based on the presumption of sameness, we take advantage of strengths and perhaps minimize weaknesses. On first read, it sounds wonderful. We would welcome the ability to meet individual needs and improve collective performance through a more precise understanding of learning, motivation, values, and content knowledge. But the idea of codifying and relying on standardized profiles (more than we already do) is discomforting.

Kosslyn writes about the implementation challenges, including the fact that each of the factors evaluated for inclusion in his periodic table is to some degree interdependent; formulas would have to allow for multiple combinations of data and would also need a mechanism to consider contexts as modifiers. He suggests a long-term strategy to identify how individual factors like motivation and information processing preference interact with each other, as a prelude to developing the profiles. Do we have the ability to make this happen? Certainly. Is this a societal objective that we should pursue? I’m not so sure.

There are many questions. To operate at maximum effectiveness, would participation be mandatory? At what age do we generate the profiles? Where would the responsibility lie for deciding the numerical value - establishing the worth - placed on each profile category? We are products of both birth and environment; how does that factor in? Might the official categorizations serve to restrict individuals’ future opportunities? What might we sacrifice by reliance on such a framework to help manage individual and group interactions?

The introduction to the 2009 world question opens with “Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves.” Agreed. Creative, intelligent, passionate women and men are engaging now in important discussions and envisioning way to resculpt our future. That’s exciting. But as the Edge editor notes, throughout history much of significance has been designed and implemented and we did not have a vote. We may not vote, but we need to care enough to join in the conversations.