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“Our lives on this planet have improved in so many amazing ways over the last century. On average, we are now healthier, more affluent and literate, less violent and longer living. Despite these unprecedented positive changes, clear signs exist that we are in the midst of an emerging crisis–one that has not yet been recognized in its full breadth, even though it lurks just beneath the surface of our casual conversations and swims in the undercurrents of our news feeds. This is not the well-known crisis that we’ve induced upon the earth’s climate, but one that is just as threatening to our future. This is a crisis of our minds. A cognition crisis…
We need better brains to manage the deluge of information we consume on the internet, on social media, on our smartphones today–as well as the new technologies we’ll surely encounter tomorrow. We need to elevate the maturity of our collective consciousness in order to thrive in this new environment.
This calls for something big: coordinated effort by major actors, from the White House and the National Institutes of Health to the United Nations and the power brokers at Davos. Indeed, addressing the cognition crisis should be positioned as a grand challenge, on par with other pressing global priorities, such as eradicating infectious diseases and disseminating clean water.
Success in solving such global challenges depends upon us having the mental capacity to actually solve them: high-level attention, reasoning, creativity, decision making, compassion, and wisdom are required. If we can’t focus our attention and make creative, wise, and more future-oriented decisions, we will never effectively deal with complex, time-delayed crises like the one affecting our climate, no matter how much information we acquire…
This is a perfect opportunity for the same technologies that are a source of the cognition crisis to play a positive role in enhancing what makes us human, rather than diminishing us.” Read full article by Adam Gazzaley over at Medium.
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