Damon and I are very different in that he is much more a dominant

“Damon and I are very different, in that he is much more a dominant character – I don’t think he likes experiencing anyone’s vulnerability – so I was really happy to get this letter, because it meant that he was showing a more sensitive side to his nature. When we were touring we’d have some pretty horrible digs at each other – to the point where we felt that we actually hated each other. But when we started to make the new album we just found that there was a lot of fun to be had.”It’s funny that the more superficially “up” sound of the other records wasn’t really the sound of people enjoying themselves “That’s true.” Coxon shakes his head ruefully. “We weren’t really having a right royal knees up.” This brings back the memory of something Albarn uttered gnomically just before he sloped off: “Nothing is really as it seems at any given point.”Albarn’s advice is something his rivals would do well to bear in mind, because if he carries on the way he’s going at the moment it will never again be necessary for Britain’s pop fans to echo the immortal words of Harry Enfield’s Hula Hoops advert: “Oi, Albarn, No!” And if the rest of 1997’s big Britpop comebacks are as triumphant as this one, it’s going to be a very good year.. Being a bit behind the curve, I had only just heard of the digital revolution last February when Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine, wearing a shirt with no collar and his hair as long as Felix Mendelssohn’s, looking every inch the young California visionary, gave a speech before the Cato Institute announcing the dawn of the 21st century’s digital civilisation. As his text, he chose the maverick Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who 50 years ago prophesied that radio, television, and computers would create a “noosphere”, an electronic membrane covering the earth and wiring all humanity together in a single nervous system.

Geographic locations, national boundaries, the old notions of markets and political processes – all would become irrelevant. With the Internet spreading over the globe at an astonishing pace, said Rossetto, that marvellous modem-driven moment is almost at hand

Could be. But something tells me that within 10 years, by 2006, the entire digital universe is going to seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories. It is called brain imaging, and anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding 21st-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it.
Brain imaging refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions, in real time. The most advanced forms currently are three-dimensional electroencephalography using mathematical models; the more familiar PET scan (positron emission tomography); the new fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which shows brain blood-flow patterns, and MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy), which measures biochemical changes in the brain; and the even newer PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe, which is, in fact, so new that it still has that length of heavy lumber for a name.

Used so far only in animals and a few desperately sick children, the PET reporter gene/PET reporter probe pinpoints and follows the activity of specific genes. On a scanner screen you can actually see the genes light up inside the brain.By 1996 standards, these are sophisticated devices. Ten years from now, however, they may seem primitive compared to the stunning new windows into the brain that will have been developed.Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about “the mind”, “the self”, “the soul” and “free will” that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience. Granted, all those sceptical quotation marks are enough to put anybody on the qui vive right away, but Ultimate Scepticism is part of the brilliance of the dawn I have promised.Neuroscience, the science of the brain and the central nervous system, is on the threshold of a unified theory that will have an impact as powerful as that of Darwinism 100 years ago. Already there is a new Darwin, or perhaps I should say an updated Darwin, since no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin I than he does His name is Edward O Wilson.

He teaches zoology at Harvard, and he is the author of two books of extraordinary influence, The Insect Societies and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Not A new synthesis but The new synthesis; in terms of his stature in neuroscience, it is not a mere boast.Wilson has created and named the new field of sociobiology, and he has compressed its underlying premise into a single sentence. Every human brain, he says, is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid”. You can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film.

The print is the individual’s genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution, and there is not much anybody can do about it. Furthermore, says Wilson, genetics determine not only things such as temperament, role preferences, emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also many of our most revered moral choices, which are not choices at all in any free-will sense but tendencies imprinted in the hypothalamus and limbic regions of the brain, a concept expanded upon in 1993 in a much-talked-about book, The Moral Sense, by James Q Wilson (no kin to Edward O).This, the neuroscientific view of life, has become the strategic high ground in the academic world, and the battle for it has already spread well beyond the scientific disciplines and, for that matter, out into the general public. Both liberals and conservatives without a scientific bone in their bodies are busy trying to seize the terrain. The gay rights movement, for example, has fastened on to a study published in July of 1993 by the highly respected Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health, announcing the discovery of “the gay gene”. Obviously, if homosexuality is a genetically determined trait, like left-handedness or hazel eyes, then laws and sanctions against it are attempts to legislate against Nature. Conservatives, meantime, have fastened upon studies indicating that men’s and women’s brains are wired so differently, thanks to the long haul of evolution, that feminist attempts to open up traditionally male roles to women are the same thing: a doomed violation of Nature.Wilson himself has wound up in deep water on this score; or cold water, if one need edit. In his personal life Wilson is a conventional liberal, PC, as the saying goes – he is, after all, a member of the Harvard faculty concerned about environmental issues and all the usual things.