Curiosity is a
virtue. It is evolutionarily advantagious because it enables human
beings to learn new things and to expand the horizon of their living
situation. However it's becoming more and more of a hinder for human
mind with the advent of internet. The problem is that internet
provides too much information—so much that it diverts and distracts
us from our task or goal, while feeding our brain with useless
information.
Like the gold
fish: Gold fish doesn't know what is to be full. If you have a tank
of gold fish, and you keep feeding them, they will keep eating until
they are so full that their stomach burst and they die, it seems that
there is no "threshhold" in their poorly under-evolved
nervous system to process what is being "full".
The curiosity
of human mind is just like the appetite of gold fish, we will keep
absorbing and reading, and getting to know more things as long as
they are availble. This trait was very useful in acient times, when
knowledge and new information was very scarce so our brains were
evoloved to be very readily attracted to new knowledge and
information and to get them all. At that time to miss a crucial
information could be fatal, like missing the information of which
area there are tigers and which area there are food. (and it can't
be looked up on internet )
However, the
mordern society and internet provides too much of knowledge for our
poor brain to absorb for a life time, but the trait of being
generally curious still get inherited till now. We still don't want
to miss one single information even when there is waayyyy too much
information already. That's why we can't drag ourselves away from
facebook to get to work, or why we spend endless time jumping from
one useless link to another. The reason you clicked on my article, is
probably not because you believe there would be valueable source of
information (which it is actually :) ), but more because of you see a
link and your curious brain start to fire a natural instinct and you
clicked on the link without being aware of what you were doing.
The result of
this inconvinient curiosity, is tons of time wasted on internet.
The way to deal
with this problem, is to train a task-oriented curiosity to replace
the general curiosity. So we should learn to be only curious about
the information that is related to the goal or task that I have to
achieve at hand, and be able to abandon or disregard all the
information unrelated to our goal. At the same time, we need a clear
perception of what our brain is tricking us to do and a strong will
power to not do so when the result is not desired.
I am not sure
if I am able to do that, but I can write it down in my silly blog and
give my deepest sigh to the fragile and under-evolved human beings.
Life is made of time.
ReplyDeleteNow what I always do is spend fair amount of time to make sure that a book is worth reading, or a movie is good enough to watch. And I feel is more and more reasonable, spending time on deciding is more worthy than spending it on doing.
So before clicking any link, use 1~2 seconds to think whether it's worthy to click.
BTW, your blog is worth reading too. That's why I'm here :)