Powerful Brains

Navigating the Age of Information: Ideas to Guide Our Youth

A few periods ago I wrote about how we are wiring and that the “selfs” of each of us are directed by how we choose to wire ourselves.

Today I want to reflect on how the new generation has been captured by the power of their own brains and what are paths to overcome the tyranny of our emerging hyper rationalities.

I grew up in a family that in the concert of evolution of human minds, happen to be in the stage where “high education” promoted “discussion” of topics in a very democratic way where every family member would expose their points of view and from that rich conversations and conclusions emerged; this mindset was extended to our groups of friends and families, and occasionally to social communities where we interacted where differing perspectives of conversations emerged and in not a few cases, where this democratic, open conversation about all topics, was not welcomed. This open discussion method also reached a climax and decline when the patriarch of the family was relegated by more informed and better structured rationalities by his own offspring and the family relations never fully recovered a smooth and flowing structure as it had when kids were in middle school or in earlier years.

In my generation and on the legacy for my children, I tried to use an informed, quasi scientific approach to information and thinking, but also attempted to keep an openness to the limitations of this rationality, and a clear openness to more dimensions of what it means to be human, specifically the emotional (heart), the physical (body), the spiritual (intrinsic quality and universal connection), and then the rationality (capped by the realization of it limitations). Despite my efforts, I see in my children the emergence of a new humanity, led by powerful brains imbued in what I call hyper rationality.

Hyper rationality is supported by much access to information, and hopefully, the luck of having good school training on how to access and discern objective information, from just opinions which can go from harmless to very damaging. Hyper rationality manifests in the ability of our children to receive information from the World, us, communities, society, and quickly rationally make conclusions, sometimes too definitive, but unfortunately frequently seemingly well supported. This takes us to the following dilemma:

Even well supported, rationally or scientifically structured analysis and decisions, could be incomplete and limiting, or worse, self destructive; this is because the paradigms that support the structure of rationality and science, might change as we gain more understanding and science and knowledge progress. So the dilemma emerges that hyper rationality can send us into streets with no exit, because the dimensions of our understanding are lacking something that has not yet been discovered or that we are not aware of, we could be led to wrong decisions that hurt us. The solution to this is three fold:

Under our hyper rational new beings, we should keep in mind that there are three levels of importance that should lead our lives and decisions: the third most important is our goals, in this ocean of information and decisions and perspectives, we should still consider what we want to “wire” as our “goals” for life, and that should be a directing force along our lives. The second most important is that we must always strive to be happy. In our rational and spiritual senses, striving for happiness is always a safe and correct path. All God and creator would want his beings to be happy if a good and loving creator; all rationality should lead to conclude that since we have one life to live, we should live it striving to make the best of it in a socially sensible and responsible way. The first and most important however is the we must always be humble; humble in understanding that no matter how smart we are, there are perspectives, information, and knowledge that we might not possess and hence, with a humble attitude we could keep advancing to the adventure of life, discovering, improving and been kind to ourselves.