Monday, March 25, 2013

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”   A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh



I can relate to Winnie-the-Pooh. I used to think I was smart.  The older I get, the more I feel like a "Bear of Very Little Brain".

The world is moving fast.  It gets faster by the minute.  I think it is even hard for smart people of keep up, let alone those of us who are not as endowed.  With the advent of the "information explosion", the human brain processing functions have become stressed.  How will we as a species deal with this stress?  Will our descendents develop new thinking patterns?  Will their brains function differently from ours?  How will we process all of the information that comes our way?  Do we even need to?

The evidence all points to the fact that the average human brain cannot handle the strain that it commonly finds itself under.  Why else would there not have been a virtual revolt at Nancy Pelosi's singular act of political condescension when she said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it”?  Did Americans really not care about what was about to happen to them?  I don't think so.  I think we have become desensitized to critical thinking because of the overwhelming amounts of information that come our way every day. The thought of digesting an additional 906 pages of federalese was just too much for most people.

I am one of those people.  I get over a hundred emails a day, most of them work related.  I am bombarded with information everywhere I go, and almost all of it is relevant to my life on some level.  The pace I keep during the work week is frenetic.  I need to get my arms around what is happening to me.  I need to get ahead of the game.  I need some wisdom.


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