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We are a culture of convenience and automation. Making things easier in our busy lives is considered a virtue. This even extends to our minds – the 24/7 media and entertainment outlets work overtime feeding us a steady stream of content. As a result we don’t need to do much heavy mental lifting ourselves.
But there is one problem. Much of what we do in consuming today’s always on information and entertainment sources is done passively. We spend too much time in receive mode. The effect is most dramatic when watching television. In November 2012, Psychology Today magazine reported the following effects on our brains when we turn on the tube:
- Studies have shown that watching television induces low alpha waves in the human brain. Alpha waves are brainwaves between 8 to 12 HZ. and are commonly associated with relaxed meditative states as well as brain states associated with suggestibility.
- While Alpha waves achieved through meditation are beneficial (they promote relaxation and insight), too much time spent in the low Alpha wave state caused by TV can cause unfocussed daydreaming and inability to concentrate.
- Researchers have said that watching television is similar to staring at a blank wall for several hours.
- In an experiment in 1969, Herbert Krugman monitored a person through many trials and found that in less than one minute of television viewing, the person’s brainwaves switched from Beta waves– brainwaves associated with active, logical thought– to primarily Alpha waves. When the subject stopped watching television and began reading a magazine, the brainwaves reverted to Beta waves.
- Research indicates that most parts of the brain, including parts responsible for logical thought, tune out during television viewing.
- Advertisers have known about this for a long time and they know how to take advantage of this passive, suggestible, brain state of the TV viewer. There is no need for an advertiser to use subliminal messages. The brain is already in a receptive state, ready to absorb suggestions, within just a few seconds of the television being turned on. All advertisers have to do is flash a brand across the screen, and then attempt to make the viewer associate the product with something positive.
This of of course is a good case for recording the television programsyou do watch first on a DVR and then skipping through the ads later. In fact, in an analysis in 2010 reported in the Wall Street Journal, it was found that the typical 3 hour football game broadcast contained just 11 minutes of actual play on the field. The rest of the time was taken up by time outs, commentary by the announcers, and advertisements (you now know why those Superbowl ads cost so much…).
So the easy answer is to not watch so much television. But of course TV is just one of our many forms of media and entertainment that we consume all day long. A more potent antidote to our passive consumption is to switch the brain into a proactive mode by asking some critical questions. The act of questioning immediately puts your brain into a conscious proactive mode.
Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers. – Anthony Robbins
Start by asking one of my favorite and deceptively simple questions – Why?
- Why do our weather patterns keep changing with such ferocity?
- Why is there such an emphasis on winning and losing in our society?
- Why haven’t we done better in reducing gun violence since Newtown?
- Why was it necessary to open the shops on Thanksgiving?
Questions give us the entry way to being proactive users of our technology resources versus being passive participants. They are the gateway to being intentional about our lives - identifying what information we want to acquire and then proactively acquiring it versus passively taking in what someone has decided to broadcast.
Asking the question is the first step. The second step is our own contemplation. What answers can we come up with ourselves based on our own knowledge and perceptions. We can surprise ourselves sometimes. Periodically we see that we haven’t stopped to really consider the question before but we have definite opinions about it once we start to be mindful about our own feelings.
Next is to go beyond ourselves and do a Google Search and find the best information possible to learn more about the question. There is an art to searching on the internet and a well executed search can quickly un-earth the right information. Too broad a search can get us lost in the 90,000,000+ search results that Google will bring back. [Chapter Four in Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World is focused on mastering internet search].
The fourth step is to “triangulate” the information you are coming across. See where things overlap and where people and sources from different backgrounds agree – the truth tends to linger there.
Lastly, we can start to create sequences of questions. A good set I like to drive personal change with is Why – What – How. For example:
- Why haven’t I been able to lose ten pounds.
- What is holding me back (determination, schedule issues, wrong diet, etc)?
- How do I get back on track and ensure that I achieve the goal?
The more honest we can be with ourselves in answering the questions, the better. In the end, of course, action will be required and that’s where the rubber meets the road. But hopefully the questions and the process of answering them will spur on new motivation and insight. All change and progress starts by someone first asking a great question.
One of the most mind-expanding questions of them all of course is What-If?
- What if all people saw each other as inherently the same and connected? How would we treat each other differently? How would business be conducted differently?
- What if teachers were the highest paid people in our society? How would that change the quality of our education? What would it require to achieve?
- What if we provided free healthcare and free college education to all citizens? Would it be affordable? What would we have to give up elsewhere in our national budget to achieve? Would it unleash higher levels of productivity or would the downsides outweigh the good?
- What if we could take out all contributions from political national and state political campaigns (each person would be allotted a fixed amount by the government)?
- What if all news and talk TV (think the sunday news programs frequented by politicians) had instant fact-checking and showed a ticker running at the bottom of the screen with the results?
These examples are a bit utopian for sure, but they have the power to open our minds and can spur us into investigating possibilities, and hopefully, taking action in some way to improve our own world and the world around us.
A recent quote I posted sums it up well:
"It's no measure of health, to be well-adusted to a sick society - J. Krishnamurti"...
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Or, a more current sentiment:
"Remember, the Whole System Depends Upon You Not Asking Too Many Questions"...
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Questions require no technology whatsoever, but they allow us to master and control the most basic elements of our lives (like the weight example above) and also our ever more powerful digital tools and other technology inventions. The next fifty years will provide us unforeseen technological capabilities. It will also challenge us to make decisions about how to (or not to) use our technological capabilities. Specifically, advances in genetics, robotics, artificial food sources, and other areas will require all of us to ask difficult questions in order to decide the best way forward for society. Hopefully we will all be up to the challenge. We clearly can’t afford to keep staring at that blank wall for much longer…
Wishing you success and inner peace in all your endeavors,
Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
–>If you liked this post, please forward post it your various social networks.
–>I would love to hear what great questions you have asked over the years. Please leave a comment below.
If you want to gain more insight into the topics in this post, please see Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World. The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking. With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year. Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success. It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain. The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.
The post The Television, the Wall, and Why? appeared first on Think Smarter World.
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