Are we losing our capacity for abstraction and daydreaming?
Back in the day, when we stepped into an elevator—only a few of which had background music, while others didn’t—and took that short ride with other people, or even when we were alone, our minds would wander. We’d look at the person next to us, imagine how friendly they might be, or how they reminded us of someone. We might even have offered a casual remark to break the ice a little. Or noticing a woman who seemed to have a sad look in her eyes might lead me to wonder what could have happened to her… Or perhaps noticing that one of the elevator buttons was broken, with its indicator light flashing erratically.
In other words, we had various ideas crossing our minds. Many things were indeed happening, and we were aware of what was going on—and some of those things were actually created by us. And we let ourselves be carried away by them...
We used to come up with ideas, let our minds wander—which, in a way, led us to a greater capacity for abstraction. And what advantage did that capacity for abstraction give us? What advantage did we gain from that process—that ability to generate ideas without a real pattern or need?
We were the protagonists of our own ideas, within our own thoughts.
These days, what happens is that whenever we have those little moments, we end up reaching for our smartphones. I’m in the elevator, I have “nothing to do,” and I don’t even give ideas a chance to surface—I just grab my phone right away... I’m stuck in traffic and don’t let ideas surface, and when I come to a red light, instead of thinking about something else, I end up reaching for my phone. At that very moment, I become a consumer of other people’s ideas or thoughts, rather than generating them myself.
This gradual loss of our ability to daydream—which, about 20 years ago, amounted to a few hours a day but is now virtually nonexistent—has led to and resulted in a massive loss of creativity. And why does this happen? The brain needs time to let its mind wander over an idea or a thought, so it can use that time to organize the ideas and concepts that have come up and taken shape that day, placing each one in the location where it belongs best.
One of these processes involved the brain indexing ideas and memories in the places where they should be stored. For example, in the areas of short-term and long-term memory.
What happens today, however, is very different. Everything we encounter goes straight to the prefrontal cortex and is quickly discarded. This leads to it being quickly forgotten.
So how, then, should we cultivate the kind of daydreaming that will lead us to a creative process and the development of new ideas?
A recent study revealed that, on average, people in the workplace check their cell phones for non-work-related matters every two minutes. Whenever we do this—and we’re scrolling through social media feeds—it takes us an average of 23 minutes to regain our original focus. This inevitably means we’re always active, but not focused.
We expend a lot of energy on the information that floods us, turning us into mere consumers of other people’s ideas and thoughts, and leaving us mentally numb for more than twenty minutes… And we’re caught up in this constant cycle throughout our entire day.
And many studies indicate that some people have lost the ability to read. Not that they’ve become illiterate, but because they’ve lost the ability to focus on a subject for any length of time.
Through the normal process of digitization, we’ve ended up in a world of diffuse attention. While we’re reading a book, we receive a notification that we have a new email, that we have a meeting in more than two hours—a reminder that pops up on our cell phone, watch, and who knows what other devices it will appear on.
Reading is a mental process that requires focus. We therefore have to engage in various reading exercises. It’s more or less like going to the gym. We should dedicate part of our day to reading. Just as we go to the gym or go for runs or walks to strengthen our musculoskeletal system, so too should we do with reading. If we don’t go to the gym or dedicate a few hours a week to walking, we’ll naturally face mobility issues as we get older. We all understand this concept very well.
Just like going to the gym, we should take the same care with reading. We should set aside at least one hour a day to prevent cognitive atrophy.
I confess that—perhaps not only because of social media, screen time, and the constant consumption of other people’s thoughts or ideas in the form of some “random feed”—I’ve noticed that I’ve been developing an inability to focus when I’m reading a particular document. And not necessarily work-related documents. Even topics that previously piqued my curiosity—and kept me engrossed for hours—are now points where I simply hit a wall and can’t continue.
Today’s society isn’t providing me with the conditions necessary for a less disruptive old age, and I feel I have to do something to counteract this.
Image by Felix Mittermeier from Pixabay
Original text written by 
