Modes of the Mind

I'm blogging a bit earlier than usual for the week. As I am sitting here at a cafe with my laptop running only on battery power, initially with the intention to do some work, I've decided to just use the limited time available to do my weekly post instead.

I'm going to be very speculative today. I've been thinking a lot on how the human mind has evolved over the ages. Today, we often hear that today's generation are prone Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), perhaps due to their busy digital lifestyle. They hop from one digital stimulus to another: from a tweet to an Instagram story next, to resuming a paused Youtube video before launching off a link received via Whatsapp, opening up an e-commerce site and before they know it, they have already purchased a gadget on offer and immediately shared their experience with friends on Facebook.

Well, we are all guilty of doing this, not just the millenials. What I'm curious is this: how has this kind of lifestyle affected the human mind? Have we lost our ability to concentrate? Has the digital lifestyle made us fickle and restless dopamine junkies, ever-seeking the next gratification at the speed of a swipe?

I'm also interested in playing the devil's advocate: is this in any way bad? Perhaps the world of the future requires people with the nimbleness of mind to switch context from one thing to another quickly and performing multiple tasks almost in parallel? Hasn't our ability to catch things that happen quickly improved a great deal because we are so used to watching sub-second music video sequences and grasping fleeting events that play on our tiny screens?

Doesn't today's computer games train the mind to be adapted to the challenges of the future where wars will be fought using remotely controlled drones and machines? Isn't this a 'skill' that our generation has mastered--a kind of evolutionary adaptation that give us a definite one-up on our lumbering ancestors?

If we read some of our classics like say Moby Dick, War and Peace or Les Miserables, we notice that they are all long works where the authors take their time to slowly build their characters and scenes. Certainly no publisher would accept new works in such forms anymore for today's reading audience. Was the reading public different then? Did people have that much concentration power and stamina to labour through such mighty tomes then for the sheer pleasure of it? Were their minds then different from ours? Isn't the so-called ADD-afflicted young simply functioning within the demands of their milieu, as we have compared to the exquisitely-paced thoughts of say, the Victorians?

This opens up an intriguing thought: How has our minds changed since the beginning of our species? The invention of writing has certainly changed the mind significant ways. What were our minds like before writing or even language was invented? Did we function purely on instincts? Were we better honed, just like many animals do, to our natural environment--detecting what is edible using a heightened sense of smell and simply knowing our physical location in space and time through a holistic experience of light, temperature and perhaps even earth's magnetic field? Did humans have the ability to communicate telepathically once? And more importantly, have we lost our natural instincts in exchange for the ability to reason and analyze, brought forth by the advent of the written word?

These are all interesting speculations. We need to be open to the ability of the mind to operate in many different modes. Psychedelic trips and the experiences of mystics show us that the normal mind is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg. By learning to operate and function through different mental modes, perhaps we can better tap the true potential of the human mind.