I woke up this morning, tapped my digital signal, and found this from Brian McGowan on Twitter: “What happens when complexity races ahead of the mind’s ability to adapt? When progress outpaces evolution? We need new solutions.”
Like a slow hunch, a version of this idea has been rattling around in my head for some weeks. Specifically: Is there a new kind of human intelligence evolving? Will our ability to work with knowledge in the face of limitless information select for a new kind of thinker in the 21st century? I suspect it will. Thinking and the creation of new ideas will require the capacity to balance limitless inputs with mindfulness and the ability to quiet one’s self. We weren’t built for this but we’ll be forced to adapt. We have to learn how to live with the technology we create. Some of us better than others will master what Sherry Turkle has referred to as information choreography.
How we handle attention crash will evolve as one of the next generation’s great challenges. As Brian suggested, we need solutions. This will happen, of course, once we recognize that this is a real issue that needs attention.
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Now you know why I fold psychedelia into my schtick.
Methinks I’ve been hanging around you too long.
I’ve already reached the point of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information that is out there. It feels like a sea of data that is easy to drown in.
My way of adapting has been to ignore the less important information and to try and focus on the things that directly affect my daily life.
Cathy Davidson’s new book – Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn – tackles this problem with great insight:
http://www.cathydavidson.com/
but I did keep wishing she had a chapter that was specifically about medicine.
I like that “information choreography.” It is indeed a dance, or maybe a series of dances, with the beat and rhythm and mood shifting from time to time. First step: realizing we can’t follow/learn/absorb it all and picking the absolute most essential information for you. Thanks, Bryan, for being one of those thoughtful sources.
We live in a scociety that barrages us with stimul.. We are constantly on information overload. As a species, up until the last few thousand years, our survival depended on a hyper-sensitivity to our external enviroment. We had to notice that Saber Tooth Tiger croaching in the bushes 50 yards away if we were going to outrun it. In the present that hyper-sensitivity leads us to distraction.
One of the reasons people are becoming more and more attracted to Mind-Body practices such as Yoga is that it gives the practioner an opportunity to “Practice Mindfullness”. A necessary skill for modern survival.
Fascinating topic — one that I’ve actually been really interested in myself! I spent the weekend two weeks ago reading up on how we process information and make decisions and have started to come to some different conclusions, especially when I started reading studies that showed that too much information actually can cause people to make poorer decisions — or feel worse about their decisions. Here’s a post I wrote: http://www.aging-online.com/infobesity-why-i-dont-care-what-song-youre-li.
There is also the question of whether all this information is making us “shallow.” With so many distractions, are we losing the ability to think deeply? It’s really interesting. It’s not a scientific example, but I know when I get really busy I turn off my email, IM and other input channels like Twitter so I can work without distraction. It requires self control because those other things are very impulsive.