I’ve talked about in the previous chapters about the mechanisms of the process of thought construction. So, the terrain has been already nourished in order to specifically talk about this century’s greater evil: the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome.
Just as I had the privilege to discover the Syndrome of Closed-Circuit memory, which is on the basis of domestic violence, bullying, professional conflicts, suicide, wars and other demonstrations of violence, I had the happiness to disclose the most penetrating and “epidemical” syndrome which currently targets modern society: the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome.
At the same time, however, I had the misfortune to know that most people of all ages are attacked at different levels by it, including children, who are looked at as geniuses or hyperactive beings. We destroy their childhood without noticing.
Thinking is good, thinking with critical awareness is even better, but thinking too much is a bomb against life’s quality, a balanced emotion, a creative and productive intellect.
The accelerated thinking
Not only the pessimistic content of thoughts is a problem that affects our quality of life, but – something we weren’t aware of – the excessive speed of those thoughts is also negative. Editing or speeding up a thought without any sort of control is the most blatant sign of how the I is failing at being a psyche manager. No one would stand for long a movie whose scenes would change very quickly. But we endure for years this situation in which our thought process spins its own “movie”. The physical and psychic consequences of such are enormous.
Studying the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome, as well as its causes, symptoms, consequences and overcoming mechanisms, should be part of every school program, from preschool to post-graduate courses. But we don’t have time to explore the world who consider us to be thinking beings. The “content” education just stresses out noble teachers and their students. And, to aggravate the situation, it puts at stake the creativity and emotional health.
Any layman knows that a machine cannot work day and night at high rotation levels without stopping for a single minute, because that may raise its temperature and just burn its components. But what’s unbelievable is that we, human beings, are just not aware that thinking too much without any self-control is a source of mental depletion.
Children and teenagers are mentally exhausted. Parents and teachers are just tired without knowing the reason why. Workers of the most diverse fields wake up feeling tired already and they just drag their bodies through the day.
Once I talked about the symptoms of the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome to my students and, shocked by those, all of them acknowledged that they were in need for a long rest. They urgently needed to train their I in order for it to manage their thoughts, to change their lifestyles and to a love affair with their own mental health.
Humanity has taken the wrong path; we’re just quickly, intensively and globally stressing ourselves out in this age of computers and the internet. We’re taking our psyche to a state of collective failure and we don’t understand the evil of the century.
Even if the content happens to be positive, educated, interesting, the accelerated thinking solely by itself generates an intensive brain distress, producing the most important form of anxiety of today, which has the richest symptomatically. Having had a troublesome childhood is not a necessary condition to be an anxious adult; we just need to have a hyper-accelerated mind, that’s enough for us to get sick.
There are lots of forms of anxiety, such as the post-traumatic, the obsessive-compulsive disorder, the burnout syndrome, panic disorder, however the anxiety which is produced by ATS is the most encompassing, continuous and “contagious” one. Below, I will list some of its symptoms:
I - Anxiety
II - Restlessness or an agitated mind
III – Dissatisfaction
IV - An exaggerated physical fatigue; waking up tired
V – Suffering in anticipation
VI – Irritability and mood fluctuations
VII - Impatience; everything has to be quick
VIII - Struggling to enjoy the routine (boredom)
IV - Struggling to cope with slow people
VI - A lower threshold to cope with frustration
VII - Headaches
VIII – Muscular pain
IX - Other psychosomatic symptoms (hair loss, tachycardia, high blood pressure etc.)
X – Lack of concentration
XI – Memory loss
XII – Sleep or insomnia disorders
Even though there is not a strict classification, empirically speaking we can say that those who have at least three to four of these symptoms must quickly change their lifestyle.
One of the most notorious characteristics of the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome is suffering in anticipation. We get anguished by facts and circumstances that did not happen yet, but they are already formed in our minds. Even those who hate horror movies are often able to create a haunting movie in their minds. Their I sabots their calmness.
All teachers in the world know, even though they don’t realize the cause behind it, that since the end of the 20th century, children and teenagers are getting more agitated, restless, lacking concentration, they cannot respect each other, nor they feel the pleasure of learning.
Why do they wake up tired? Because they spend lots of energy thinking and worrying themselves during their surveillance state. Sleep then stops to be a fixing tool, it just cannot recharge the energy levels at the same speed rate.
And the physic symptoms, why do they happen? When the brain is worn out, stressed and unable to restore its energy levels, it searches for shocking organs in order to give us a warning. At that moment, several psychosomatic symptoms start to surface, such as headaches and muscle pains, which represent the warning cry given by billions of cells that are just imploring for a change of lifestyle But who is the one that is actually going to listen to their own body’s voice?
And memory loss? Why do we have a whole crowd of people with a memory deficit? Because our brain is more aware than our I is. Acknowledging that we don’t know how to manage our own thoughts, that we live exhausted, the brain deploys instinctive mechanisms which block the memory’s windows, in order for us to think less and save more energy.
Often, in education meetings, I ask teachers if they have a memory deficit. The answer is always the same: almost everyone says they do. So I give them a jesting warning, but one that is serious as well. I tell them: “Dear teachers, if you are having a collective memory loss, then, how can you demand from your students to remember things during the exams?”. Many laugh and clap. But, deep down, I’m not kidding, and I’m actually pointing out to something really serious.
Our students also have the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome, which impairs the ability to assimilate and structure information and the capacity to retrieve it as well, then putting at stake their reasoning’s performance.
Brilliant students who don’t shine when they’re tested have truncated this process, it’s not because they cannot remember what was taught.
I have been saying that the ministries of Education and Culture of the most diverse countries are just wrong when they evaluate a student for his assertiveness during the exams. Students must be evaluated not only for their ability to retrieve data, but also for their inventiveness, for their schematic thinking ability, for their boldness. And, in addition to that, if we want to form thinkers, we should evaluate a student outside of those examination moments, we should evaluate them during the classes, for their interactivity, altruism, proactivity, brainstorming, their thought’s speech and social cooperation. These are the elements that will determine the social and professional success when facing the tests of our existence, much more than the answers they get right during school exams.
The memory deficit targets many different people at several different levels. You have people who forgot so much stuff that they even struggle to remember the names of their colleagues at work, the place where they put the car keys and the location in which they parked the vehicle. Trivial cases like these are a positive outcry of our brain, warning us that the red light is on, that the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome has suffocated our mind so much to the point where it’s seriously affecting our quality of life. The trivial memory deficit is a brain protection and not a problem, unlike many doctors think.
I say it again: the brain blocks certain folders of our memory in order to try to decrease the excessive number of thoughts produced by the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome. A really stressful person who has the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome can spend more energy than ten manual workers combined.
Wise is the one who does a lot by spending a little amount of energy.
What’s the point of being a working machine if we happen to lose the people we love, if we cannot have a calm, charming and motivating existence? Those who have an excessive intellectual labor, like judges, promoters, lawyers, executives, doctors, psychologists, teachers, end up developing the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome in a more intensive way. People who are more dedicated and efficient are, usually, much more stressed. Some causes of the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome are:
I – Information overload
II – Excess of activities
III - Excess of intellectual work
IV – An excessive concern
V – Over-charging
VI – An excessive use of cellphones
VII – An excessive use of computers
Information overload is the main cause of the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome. In the past, the total information amount would double itself every two, three centuries; today, that happens every year. We thought that this information avalanche, which comes from TV, school, video games, smartphones, newspapers, businesses, was not an important problem, but today we do know that the RAM phenomenon stores everything in the cerebral cortex without being authorized by the I, saturating the Continuous-Use Memory.
The continuous-use memory is the conscious epicenter of memory. Metaphorically speaking, it represents the circulation center of a human being located within a major city. In his daily life, he roams throughout a maximum of 2% of the total number of streets, avenues, stores that the city has. Eventually, he ends up stepping out of that area, moving to peripheral zones, which, in the Theory of Multifocal Intelligence, we call Existential Memory, or Unconscious Memory, as I’ve already said.
If we saturate the continuous-use memory, moving to 5% or 10%, we will expand the levels of vital anxiety and we will overstimulate the self-flow phenomenon which, in turn, will start to quickly and uncontrollably read the memory, producing thoughts in an unprecedented speed. Then, the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome is born.
I will once again use the city metaphor in order to explain these unconscious phenomena, which act in milliseconds. We all have our circulation center in a city. In a big city, a person goes to one or two drugstores. But there are hundreds of them in distant neighborhoods. If, in order to buy one drug, one would have to go to countless pharmacies and follow the most diverse routes, it would maybe take a day, perhaps a week. And this could affect your health.
The same goes for when we excessively expand our continuous-use memory, the circulation center of the “city of the memory”, we then develop a wearing and unproductive mental work. In companies, many people inform themselves and think a lot, however they just lack depth. The original ideas disappear.
There is a foundation that studies not only the process of thought construction, but it also, among others, the process of forming thinkers. I’m sure that it’s the information and thought overload which determines the quality of the ideas. Einstein had less information than most engineers and physicians of our era and, yet, he went further. It’s the way we restructure data, and not the excess of it, that determines the creativity level.
Selecting information is crucial. But, in this urgent society, we are awful when it comes to select our mind’s menu. We quickly swallow everything, without even digesting it. How could we not stress ourselves immensely? We are destructing our workers in companies, suffocating teachers in classrooms, attacking doctors in hospitals.
Let’s now talk about the sons of humanity. We, adults, in a good or a bad way, can still cope with the symptoms of the accelerated thinking syndrome, but what about the children?