(Quick – look at the word on the left and tell me the color on the right - from lumosity.com).
The human brain is the only organ we prescribe drugs to, without seeing it, or – God forbid – without truly understanding how it even works.
When you think about that, it’s a little crazy.
But there’s hope. We are about to have much better tracking of what the mind can do and how it can even change it. I am a daily student of Lumosity.com, as we all should be. When these brain games are fully developed we will be able to rewire and rework our brains each day, much as we lift weights. This is the next real breakthrough in human evolution. When we talk about the Singularity, sometimes we forget we’ll improve our own cognition as well. It is something we will all strive to do in the coming years…. your six pack abs will take a back seat to your BPI or Brain Performance Index. Which brings up Neuroplasticity – the fact that you can continue to wire your brain throughout your life.
Training our minds for what’s ahead is critical. I read somewhere that the biggest threat to our species isn’t global warming or a massive asteroid floating in from space. No. The biggest threat to our existence is our will to live. Last year there were more military suicides than there were combat deaths. That, my friends, is a canary in a coalmine. They say that depression can spread like the common cold. We must seek to quickly answer what shuts down the will to live – and correct it as soon as possible – and in a cognitive non-prescription way. That will be the real war on zombies.
To make sure we have that will to live – we must continue to find ways to rewire our brains in order to wrap our heads around what will happen in the future.
The telepathic shark knows the key to ocean survival is exploration – if the ocean is based on patches, you’d perish if you were to stay in one place for too long. Our minds will suffer if we don’t seek out new explorations.
Which brings me to the white reindeer… It’s been around all my life and now it’s time to deal with it. Mumford and Sons put it this way in the song Awake my Soul:
“How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes. I struggle to find any truth in your lies. And now my heat stumbles on things I don’t know. My weakness I feel I must finally show.”
(Which takes us back to the question at the beginning - Do you see the color or do you see the word?)