Cognitive surplus- what else could you do besides watch TV?

David McCandless created an amazing graphic recently, contrasting the amount of time Americans spend watching television each year with the cumulative amount of time it has taken to create Wikipedia. Check this out:

Image via InformationisBeautiful.net, with permission. The graphic illustrates what author Clay Shirkey calls "cognitive surplus", or spare brainpower that exists, simply waiting to be engaged. How much of that brainpower is being wasted watching television? This got me thinking, and I remembered a recent Newsweek article which pointed out that creativity is declining in America. Even as intelligence (measured by IQ) is rising, creativity (measured by CQ) is declining:
Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
What's at fault for this phenomenon? Television and video games share at least part of the blame:
It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
So, how much time is spent watching television, and how do people feel about the use of their time? Check out these statistics (source): [More . . . ]

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We are neurons

British Author Matt Ridley recently gave a stimulating and entertaining talk at TED. The central topic was about "mating ideas," but the talk (which was engaging all the way through) took an surprising turn toward the end when Ridley announced that he doesn't care whether some individuals have a somewhat higher IQ than others. Smart individuals don't necessarily make for a smart society--he suggested that Neanderthals were smart individuals, but they didn't last. What do we modern humans have the Neanderthals lacked? We exchange things and ideas (the evidence suggests that the Neanderthals didn't exchange items and didn't have any meaningful division of labor, not even a sexual division of labor). We function together and we are able to create things that nobody on earth knows how to make individually. Who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody. The "team" that makes computer mice includes the coffee-grower who provides coffee for the guy who works on an oil rig, who pumps out oil in order to allow a chemist to make plastic for the mouse. But there are 1,000,000 other members of this team. We are prolific exchangers of ideas, and that is what we have over all other species. Each of us functions like a neuron, networking incessantly, enabling the whole to be much greater than the sum of the parts. Smart individuals (despite how interesting they sometimes seem) are often dead ends. What really makes a society fly is when individuals have a propensity to exchange ideas, a built-in drive for mating their ideas, allowing their ideas to go where no smart individual (or even many groups of smart individuals) could have ever anticipated. For an interesting epilogue, consider the work of David Sloan Wilson, who suggests that humans are half-bee (we're not quite there), and that religion serves as the binding force.

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Tim Minchin

I've recently discovered a new comedian and I would like to share. He's an Australian, Mr. Tim Minchin. I forget now where I stumbled upon him, but he is a delight. For one he's a musician/composer, and, as a keyboard player myself, I have to admit to being envious of his chops. But his comedy...ah, this is something special. I urge everyone to go to YouTube and see all of the videos. He is a skeptic. This video gives a fair example.

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On unemployment benefits

I agree with Dylan Ratigan on at least one aspect of unemployment benefits:

I don't even agree with the current unemployment program in this country. I believe people should have to volunteer for a non-profit for 10-20 hours a week to qualify for unemployment. However, our vote-loving politicians like to keep their jobs by giving future generation's money away for nothing in return.
William Black echoes this sentiment.

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Mark Tiedemann wraps up

Over the past few days, I've been publishing sections of an engaging discussion with Mark Tiedemann that I videotaped about a year ago. I only recently got around to cutting the session up into individual videos, but the delay allowed me to enjoy the discussion anew, and it also allowed me to appreciate more than ever that the topics that draw Mark's attention tend to be relatively timeless. As you can probably see, this discussion was spontaneous. I went to Mark's house with a video camera and a few general topics scribbled down, no specific agenda. We both allowed the conversation go where it wanted to go. In these final two videos from last year's discussion, the topics are VI) The importance of knowing history and VII) Church and State. I hope you've enjoyed getting to know Mark as much as I have. If you'd like to know more about Mark's way of viewing and analyzing the world, he has already posted almost 200 articles at DI, all of them readily available.

Continue ReadingMark Tiedemann wraps up