It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
―
Aging in Place
In 1999, Author James Gleick wrote the book, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
Below is a blurb from the website goodreads.com:
From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today’s world.
Most of us suffer some degree of “hurry sickness,” a malady that has launched us into the “epoch of the nanosecond,” a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we’re still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.
This was one of the most influential reads of my academic career, Gleick predicted the world many of us inhabit today (like it or not).
Every morning as I exit my local Starbucks while ambulating, that first sip of drug of choice for the speed culture (DOC) is taken on the move. What enables this madness is design, that is, the lid. Dutch Bros even gives you coffee cups with the tilted raised lid and a fat straw jammed in so you can inhale the caffeine (cringe worthy for any cafe culture sidewalk lingering European).
Some of us are old enough to have experienced the evolution of “to go” (aka take away) coffee cup lids. In the old days the thin white plastic coffee cup lid was flat as a pancake with a tiny hole in the middle. This design was meant to get you to a destination site where you would carefully pull the lid off the Styrofoam cup and chat awhile. The Darwinian transformation of the coffee cup lid now is raised, sippy-cup style WITH A FAT TUBE to suck it up more efficiently on the run while texting. Goodbye coffee break.
I imagine in the very distant future some earth astronaut will find in a small patch of dirt left undeveloped somewhere, buried beneath the surface, a coffee cup lid with a fat straw protruding from the lid. This will be an artifact of the speed culture left behind. It seems to me this all began with the TV dinner, picked up speed with the microwave, then went on steroids with smarter and smarter technologies like the mobile iPhone. We have all drunk the Kool-Aid.
Frantic pace is almost a badge of honor in our culture (LinkedIn), but the real prize is time to linger…You know you’ve made it when lollygagging (an old word) is in your plans for the week.
My friend and colleague, Linda Kafka, a NeuroDesigner, posted an article on LinkedIn related to the theme of FASTER. She mentions Anjan Chatterjee and his work on the essential reasons behind slowing down to give the brain time to absorb the beauty in our environment.
Neuroaesthetics explores how our brains react to art, design, and the places around us. It helps explain why some environments bring us calm, why certain colors lift our mood, and how art can evoke deep emotions—even when we can’t quite put our feelings into words.
But here’s the key: to truly experience these benefits, we need to pause and take a moment to appreciate them. Anjan Chatterjee, a world-renowned expert in this field, explores these ideas in his research and books. His work helps us recognize that to experience the full benefits of aesthetics, we need to slow down and truly notice them.
A link to the article is found here: https://ameatendre.com/from-brain-to-home-how-our-built-environment-impacts-who-we-are-with-dr-anjan-chatterjee-part-1/
There is no more life-affirming message than to stop and smell the roses, but when’s the last time you did?
The joy of living can suffer under the tyranny of efficiency. . .
See
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