I ran out of milk earlier, and as one of those weird people that drink coffee with a splash of milk nowadays, it necessitated a trip to the shop.
Sitting at the computer without coffee and milk readily available is a stress I would prefer not to endure...
It's is a whole 300 yard stroll, through totally empty country lanes up to a 'T' junction, and onto the main road.
Th main road is a different matter than the empty country lanes. There may be as many as 3 motorbikes and a car, per hour, on the main road.
You gotta keep your radar active. It's a jungle out there!
( Well it is once you actually emerge from the jungle, where I live.)
The main road was in mayhem!
There was at least six motorbikes, six cars, and two trucks there...
It felt like war zone, and was an affront to my senses , I can tell you!
And then it hit me!
The noise, not a vehicle.
Now I am sure we have all been hit with an assault of decibels in our time, and it's not exactly new, but it got me thinking...
I like thinking, sometimes...
I decided NOT to research anything online about this post....
So this hypothesis may well be out there, or may in fact not be, or it is all complete bollocks.
So here are my thoughts...
What if your brain needs to empty itself of information?
Not because it is unable to keep absorbing more but to make the efficiency of the brain to continue work in it's optimum state.
Bear with me here....
The senses we have take in various form of information throughout the day - and all that information goes into the brain.
Consciously or otherwise.
What if it is slowly filling up, and then overnight (sleep), draining out the pointless 'noise'?
A nightly defragmenting, if you will.
Now what if there is a maximum speed that the defrag can take place?
What if the amount of information absorbed through the day is larger than the defrag can process during the night?
Irrelevant of the rate of which it is absorbed into the brain. (think a nightclub with music at a 120 decibels for three hours, being the same amount of information as a days traffic noise, for example).
Thinking in those terms, maybe with the onset of the digital age, and all the extra information hitting our grey matter, we are actually clogging ourselves up, ever so slowly.
I have no idea on the speed of this defragmenting process (or even if it's true) and maybe the 'clogging up' of the system is so slow- but incremental non the less- and maybe is takes place over years and decades...
What if the information 'unclogging' can't take place overnight anymore?
( compared to pre- digital times, when the only defragmenting process required was the traffic noise, the odd telephone call, and daily conversations).
What if the defrag process takes much longer now to fulfill it's function, but our biological clocks just are just not built for it? For millennia , out 8 hour 'down time' was more than enough?
What would be the result of this, if it were real?
Feeling less sharp?
Feeling less able to cope?
Feeling like you were missing things?
Feeling depressed for no logical reason?
Lethargy?
As our brains slowly clog up, without the time to defrag, maybe our biological processes also suffer. Things that would normally be undertaken without any interruption of service, now have delays...queuing up due to 'the clog'?
And possibly far reaching health effects...
As I walked to the shop in the cacophony that ten vehicles made, it dawned on me that as biological units, we are not designed for much noise at all.
If you think that less than 300 years ago, we would never have heard a car, or any machinery in fact - whatsoever.
Ever.
Our world would have been one whose only noises were nature, and other people talking.
300 years is not a long time - at all - in the scheme or our biological evolution.
Our brain evolution.
We haven't change much for tens of thousand's of years.
What if , we couldn't function as our efficient human selves, with all this extra 'noise'. Maybe that the industrial revolution wasn't enough t reach this point of 'terminal velocity'.
At some point (the digital age and the internet?), we reached that tipping point.
A 'terminal amount' of daily information without the tools deal with it.
A point where, as biological units, our defrag wasn't working as it should anymore and ever so slowly our brains were clogging up with information we couldn't empty ourselves of overnight.
And ever so slowly, actually preventing us from thinking in the same that we have done for centuries...
....I only went for a pint of milk...