by Eric Blair
March 18, 2012
from
ActivistPost Website
Spanish version
In his controversial book
The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil speaks of a
time in the very near future when human intelligence will be
amplified by thousands of times current abilities with artificial
implants.
Although these
super humans will far outpace those without
implants, Kurzweil admits that average humans will
exponentially evolve their cognitive ability naturally in an attempt
to keep pace.
We may be seeing signs of this evolution
now, where increasing numbers of children are being labeled with
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
What if this "disorder" was actually an adaptive measure to the
"information age" to help children organize and process large sums
of information quickly without obsessing on meaningless details?
A new research study seems to suggest
that this may be the case. The study concluded that children who
have wandering minds may indeed have sharper problem solving
abilities and better multi-tasking skills.
From the
Telegraph:
Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said
that those with higher working memory capacity reported 'more
mind wandering during these simple tasks', but their performance
did not suffer.
The results, published online in the journal Psychological
Science, appear to confirm previous research that found working
memory allows humans to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human
Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said:
'What
this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the
task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working
memory resources deploy them to think about things other than
what they’re doing.'
Though the study wasn't specifically
designed for people diagnosed with ADHD, its primary symptom of
"wandering minds" and inability to concentrate for long periods of
time was the focus of the study.
In our increasingly outdated society that appears to
value monotonous focus on narrow tasks, ADHD is viewed and
treated as a disorder.
In fact, some public school officials
have attempted to
force students diagnosed with ADHD
to submit to being medicated so that they can sit through eight
hours of excruciatingly boring memorization of meaningless details.
There are many recognized benefits to those labeled with ADHD.
Here are just some of those
beneficial characteristics:
-
Ability to find
alternate paths to overcome obstacles
-
Able to take on large
situations
-
Adaptive/collaborative
-
Adventurous, courageous,
lives outside of boundaries
-
Always finding alternate
routes to any given location
-
Always willing to help
others
-
Ambitious - you want to
be everything when "you grow up"
-
Artistic
-
Attractive personality -
magnetic due to high energy
-
Being able to see the
big picture
-
Being able to see the
patterns in the chaos
-
Being intuitive towards
others' difficulties
-
Broad focus - can see
more, notice things more
-
Can create order from
chaos
-
Can do many projects at
once
-
Can make people feel
they are heard
-
Can see the big picture
-
Can talk about several
things at one time
-
Can think on my feet
-
Career variety
-
Center of attention
-
Comfortable talking in
front of groups
-
Comfortable with change
and chaos
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-
Compassion for others
and for themselves
-
Conceptualizes well
-
Confidence
-
Constantly evolving
-
Courageous
-
Creates connections
easily
-
Creative
-
Creative writing
-
Creative - musical,
artistic, "dramatic"
-
Good in a crisis
-
Good at customer
relations
-
Dedicated
-
Detail-oriented
-
Determined to gain more
control
-
Eager to make friends
-
Eager to try new things
-
Empathetic, sensitive
-
Energetic
-
Entrepreneurial
-
Excellent organizers
using journals and reminders (notes etc.)
-
Flexible - changes as
the situation requires
-
Fun guy to be around
-
Goal-oriented
-
Good at conceptualizing
-
Good at motivating self
and others
-
Good at multitasking
-
Good at problem solving
-
Good at public speaking
|
(See the full list
HERE)
Notably, each of these characteristics
is an expression of independence and counter to being controlled.
-
Is it any wonder why "officials"
seek to treat children with these abilities with
mind-numbing drugs?
-
You can't have a generation of
free-thinking, problem-solving, independent humans running
around if your goal is to have full-spectrum control over
society, now can you?
It seems that a more responsible society
should recognize special abilities and learn to harness and direct
them to reach their full potential instead of suppressing them with
drugs.
Regardless, adaptation to our
environment is natural and cannot be contained.
As our information environment becomes saturated to the point where
minor details are irrelevant to the big picture, those with ADHD
seem to possess the modern-day "opposable thumb" that allows them to
progress while left-brained, detail-obsessed, pseudo robots may
appear stuck scratching symbols on caves all day.
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