At the end of September 2009, an experiment done at MIT on social network analysis could identify which students are gay just by considering the data available on their Facebook pages. Through analyzing their online friends and the connections between them they could infer their gender preferences with a degree of accuracy. This raises more questions about online privacy.

I wrote in Google, Privacy and the Need to be Seen that we are apt at showing ourselves online in trying to fulfill the natural human need for mirroring, to be seen and understood, which probably hasn’t been actualized in the proper way at the proper time in our lives. Also, our skills for self-recognition and inner mirroring is becoming weaker and weaker because of the growing pressure from external inputs, mostly by the Net. No time for reflection and no empty space.

Social network analysis can infer much more about us than our sexual preferences. The ordinary mind in itself, as most spiritual teachers say, is quite mechanical in its behavior. Joining this mechanistic nature of the mind with the amount of available data which most people spontaneously show on the Net is such that a well-written software could guess many of our ideas, opinions, tastes and, most important for marketers, which products we’ll be willing to buy.

Psychoanalysis, neuro-linguistic programming and any other science of the inner being knows well that our beliefs and ideas are for the most part created by the conditioning acquired during our lives, especially in childhood.

Marketers have a special aptitude for cataloging people on the basis of their personalities, attitudes, lifestyles and preferences. But they aren’t interested in understanding the roots of those attitudes or in going beyond them. More than anything else, marketers are interested in the conditionings which have been created through a compensation for an undeveloped inner quality.

For instance, we might “need” some sort of external appearance (goods, clothes, gadgets, make-up, muscles or a slim figure) to compensate for a weak sense of self-worth, or we could need to connect frequently with people online because we aren’t able to keep in touch with our inner self and for the lack of authentic real-life relationships, thus needing computers, connections, smartphones and such gizmos.

Marketers, as well as psychoanalysts or spiritual teachers, are interested in knowing us and our conditionings, but the former are interested in making them stronger, reinforcing our “needs” instead of liberating us from them.

The understanding of marketers of the human soul is quite superficial since they don’t really need to go into the depths of people’s souls to exploit their weaknesses commercially, as much as a pusher doesn’t need to know the reasons why his client needs drugs.

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Everybody can remember when, as a child, our parents told us not to get too close to the TV. That was “close.” Then the personal computer came and we got closer. Even closer with laptops. Then we went closest with smartphones.

The information which appears on a screen almost compels us in following it with our eyes. Giving attention to visual novelties activates the ancient neurophysiological system which rewards us with a pleasurable dopamine release. In ancient times, paying attention to a visual stimulus gave more chances for survival, so it was rewarded in pleasurable ways. Since any visual novelty was potentially a predator or a prey, our neurophysiological system developed reward systems to give us more chances of survival.

One of the causes of the Internet, videogames and in general addiction to electronic gadgets, could be this need to follow the many external visual stimuli. What happens on the screen brings our attention to what’s going on, thus activating our reward system based on dopamine.

Even though we look at many inputs in fast sequence, our field of vision and the movements of the eyes are very limited, and in many cases we end up staring blankly at the screen. Many years ago, an artist friend of mine, knowing I was spending much time on a computer, gave me a small painting depicting a landscape where the eye could relax in an unfocused way. Very kind and useful, but I didn’t really use it since the pressures of the external inputs were stronger.

This act of staring brings both a limited eye movement and the slowing down of the frequency of blinking. When we spend many hours every day staring at a screen, something is probably going to change on a neurophysiological level.

We know that moving the eyes in different directions can improve memory and the communications between the brain hemispheres. The article of the British Psychological Society says:

One hundred and two participants listened to 150 words, organized into 10 themes (e.g. types of vehicle), read by a male voice. Next, 34 of these participants moved their eyes left and right in time with a horizontal target for 30 seconds (saccadic eye movements); 34 participants moved their eyes up and down in time with a vertical target; the remaining participants stared straight ahead, focussed on a stationary target.
After the eye movements, all the participants listened to a mixture of words: 40 they’d heard before, 40 completely unrelated new words, and 10 words that were new but which matched one of the original themes. In each case the participants had to say which words they’d heard before, and which were new.
The participants who’d performed sideways eye movements performed better in all respects than the others: they correctly recognised more of the old words as old, and more of the new words as new. Crucially, they were fooled less often by the new words whose meaning matched one of the original themes – that is they correctly recognised more of them as new. This is important because mistakenly identifying one of these ‘lures’ as an old word is taken as a laboratory measure of false memory.

Eye movements improve creativity as well as the resolution of problems. Science Blogs describe eye-tracking research by Grant and Spivey (2003). They showed that people solved a medical problem spontaneously without any hints when they looked at a picture depicting a human body through moving the eyes in and out of the pictured body. This is called “embodied cognition,” meaning that some parts of the body reflect an internal mental process externally.

There are also hypotheses which say that the communication between the cerebral hemispheres is improved by moving the eyes in different directions and that could be a support to psychological therapy.
So we know that rotating the eyes leads to an improvement of memory, an increase of creativity, and a greater exchange of information between the brain hemispheres. Information overload, little movement of the eyes, and decreased creative and memory capacities join in mutual feedback. In this respect, I sometimes practice a light neurophysiological exercise by rotating the ocular globes in each direction for several minutes.

I also noted that maintaining the gaze on a near object for a long period of time decreased my ability to see things in a wide perspective and to observe the correlation between information distant from each other. I tend to see details but less the broader perspective. I find it fundamental to take the gaze to a distance in moments of reflection, in a relaxed and unfocused mode. Everywhere I am I tend to stay on high floors with a wide view. Further, keeping the visual focus always at the same distance and at the same angle diminishes the blinking, symbolically bringing fixation of even a thought.

If this fixation is bad enough for adults, it can be even worse for children. There’s strong pressure in prematurely developing the intellectual aspects of children, but much research has demonstrated that children learn mainly through their bodies and how that will give them academic success later. So give your child an early exposure to computers and you’ll most probably make him dumber instead of more intelligent and creative.

Furthermore, close contact with a screen at an early age could even interfere with some neurophysiological development. Alliance for Childhood published Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood (College Park, 2001). On page 22, they write:

Infants and toddlers develop their visual-spatial awareness first through cross-movements in space, such as crawling, and then by gradually fine-tuning their hand-eye coordinations, until their eyes become adept not only at following their hands, but at leading their hands in finer and finer motions. Finally, after many integrated experiences of seeing, touching, and moving their hands and the rest of their bodies in three-dimensional space, young children develop an appreciation of visual forms as real objects, and the capacity to visualize objects without actually seeing them. Too much time spent in passively looking at two-dimensional representations of objects on a computer screen – or a television set – may interfere with this developing capacity.

Then, at page 23:

Grade school children need even more frequent breaks from close computer work than adults do. That’s because their muscular and nervous systems are still developing. It’s not until about the age of 11 or 12 that their capacity to balance and coordinate the movement and the focusing of both eyes together is fully mature.

At that age most kids in Western countries were already familiar with screens for years through videogames, gadgets and computers. First, we give them screens to “enhance” their minds, then we give them Ritalin to “fix” them neurophysiologically.

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There’s an unusual but apparent alliance between two philosophies which are barely aware of and rarely come into contact each other, which conjure against the physical reality and the body. The first “philosophy” is represented by what have variously been called Cyberspace, Technopoly, Cyburbia and other names.

I prefer to define it as “The Digitalization of Reality,” wherein more and more human activities are being translated into bytes. Work, communication, media, entertainment, friends, dating, sexuality, culture, shopping, politics and causes are among the growing number of human needs that have gone digital.

While the Internet was something which earlier we mostly visited, now we are inhabiting the virtual worlds full-time and engineer them according to our mental projections. The Cartesian dream of a mind without a body has almost been fulfilled (even though in his old age Descartes, in Passions of the Soul, affirmed that “the soul is jointly united to all the parts of the body”).

This separation has a long history of Western thought starting from the Judeo-Christian separation between body and soul up to people like the transhumanist Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, or the singularity guru Raymond Kurzweil who want to download the biological human mind to a safer mechanical medium in order to achieve nothing less than immortality.

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In the middle of Twitter-mania and the push toward writing and reading fast, updated and short-lived information, it is good to be reminded about different ways of reading by two spiritual teachers from two very different paths. One is from Carlo Maria Martini.

The Christian tradition developed lectio divina (divine reading), a method in four steps: “lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio” (reading, reflecting, oration, meditation). Those successions are the products of theological and anthropological reflections on the way the believer approaches God’s word, in order to assimilate them and transform them in real life, in action. (Carlo Maria Martini, Lectio Divina e Pastorale: A Cura di Salvatore A. Panimolle, Ascolto della Parola e Preghiera, La “Lectio Divina”, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1987, p. 217).

The second is from the Indian mystic Osho.

To read is to know a certain art. It is to get into deep sympathy. It is to get into a sort of participation. It is a great experiment in meditation. But if you read the Gita the same way as you read novels you will miss it. It has layers and layers of depth. Hence, path – every day once has to repeat. It is not a repetition; if you know how to repeat it, it is not a repetition. If you don’t know, then it is a repetition.
Just try it for three months. Read the same book – you can choose any small book – every day. And don’t bring your yesterday to read it: just again fresh as the sun rises in the morning – again fresh as flowers come this morning, again fresh. Just open the Gita again, excited, thrilled. Again read it, again sing it, and see. It reveals a new meaning to you.
It has nothing to do with yesterday and all the yesterdays when you were reading it. It gives you a certain significance today, this moment, but if you bring your yesterdays with you, then you will not be able to read the new meaning. Your mind is always full of meaning. You think you already know. You think you have been reading this book again and again – so what is the point? Then you can go on reading it like a mechanical thing and you can go on thinking a thousand and one other thoughts. Then it is futile. Then it is just boring. Then you will not be rejuvenated by it. You will become dull. (Osho, The Search: Talks on the Ten Bulls of Zen, Rebel Publishing House, 1977, p. 122).

I wonder if the compulsive search for the latest news/messages and for an unending flow of information could be a reflection on the mental level of the everlasting freshness experienced by an enlightened soul. Such a condition re-creates itself anew at every moment, keeping the mind free from the burdens of the past.

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Ever since the Internet came into our lives it has been regarded as the medium supposed to stimulate a positive meeting between cultures and to ease the spread of information neglected by the traditional media. While it is true that everybody can set up a blog or a website with a small technical and financial investment and share their writings, music or videos for the whole world, it seems that the big media are even bigger on the Net and that the understanding between cultures didn’t improve much even 15 years after the mass diffusion of the Internet.

If we look at the academic level, the Economist published an article titled “Great minds think (too much) alike” where research by James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, is introduced, whose work has been published in Science. The conclusion of his work says that, “as more journals become available online, fewer articles are being cited in the reference lists of the research papers published within them. Moreover, those articles that do get a mention tend to have been recently published themselves. Far from growing longer, the long tail is being docked.” The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson in 2004 to define the niche markets which the Web can approach, where unique products take an important commercial value.

Evans discovered instead that the great variety of papers available on the Net, far from widening the range of quoted sources, actually gave privilege to the ones already well known and even more to the most recent ones, probably the easiest to find searching in Google.

On the commercial level, New Scientist published the article “Online shopping and the Harry Potter effect” writing that “big sellers have never been bigger… Andrew Bud from the cellphone software company mBlox have analysed a year’s worth of downloads from a well-known internet music store. They found that of the 13 million tracks available, 52,000 – just 0.4 per cent – accounted for 80 per cent of downloads”.

New Scientist explains the phenomenon as, “easy digital replication and efficient communication through cellphones, email and social networking sites encourage fast-moving, fast-changing fads. The result is a homogenisation of tastes that boosts the chances of popular things becoming blockbusters, making the already successful even more successful.”

This has been confirmed experimentally by Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, New York.

Together with his colleagues Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, he tested the effect of communication and peer approval on the musical tastes of 14,000 teenage volunteers recruited online (Science, vol. 311, p. 854;). A set of 48 songs was made available to all the volunteers, who could download whichever songs they wanted. The researchers split the volunteers into eight groups; in some, group members could see what their peers were downloading, but in others they had no such knowledge. In the socially connected groups, the winner took all: popular songs became more popular, unpopular songs more unpopular. This effect was much less pronounced in the socially isolated groups.

Watts thinks that information overload makes us more dependent on other people’s opinions to find out what we like. Then New Scientist asks, “why, when we have so much information at our fingertips, are we so concerned with what our peers like? Don’t we trust our own judgement?”

In another article, a psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and close-minded. In a psychological test, Wikipedians, as expected, “were more comfortable online than in the real world” but they, surprisingly, scored low even on agreeableness and openness.

During an Italian conference dedicated to music on the Net, one boy asked the speaker, “We can download the complete discography of any artist, but the problem is: What do we like?” An interesting question, which gives the real point of the matter.

Choices are connected with our personality; choices are bridges between our inner view and an external event. We can make the right choices for ourselves only when we can listen to ourselves deep enough to access the essence of our personality and join it to the outer life. But in order to do that we need both a solid personality which we are aware of and, some quiet and empty time to look into ourselves instead of following just external inputs. Both states are quite hard to access in online life.

We tend to believe that information can construct our personality and give us an individuality. We identify ourselves mostly with what we know, with our thoughts and beliefs, in another world with what fills our mind. But those aspects are as fragile and unreal as the financial derivatives market. The ideas and beliefs which fill our minds are essentially the products of our familiar and cultural conditionings, which give the ego the illusion of being “somebody” with its unique peculiarities.

Information, detached from experience, detached from a felt inner view and detached from an ethical background, mostly reinforces our conditionings instead of opening our minds to new areas. Neil Postman, in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p. 63), wrote:

Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.

The mind’s main job and hobby is to separate, to discriminate, and to judge. It gives us a powerful way to read and act on reality which gave science and technology the strongest roles in our culture. Unless mind is subordinated to a broader (we could say spiritual) awareness, is non-inclusive by nature. In this view it is not surprising to know that online, we tend to stay in our territory with what is already known and accepted by our minds. Our social connections online can surely broaden minds too but mostly, as happens with other media, they promote uniformization.

Actually, we experience the paradox of both uniformization and the explosion of differences; Lee Siegel expressed this paradox as one “must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else” (Against the Machine, New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008, p. 73).

The source of this apparently contradictory phenomenon is in the ego itself, which does need to be recognized and accepted by people but at the same time feel different from anyone else in order to prove its specialness. Commercially, we are presented with millions of choices to let us think we are unique but then people tend to choose what is known or anyway what is known by somebody we want to be connected with and recognized by, much as teenagers are dependent on the peer group’s opinions.

When we are presented with millions of commercial options and we choose one we delude ourselves in thinking we are recognizing ourselves and building a part of our individuality. The market, as the Situationists had already seen in the 1950s, first takes away our real needs of connection and authenticity, then illudes us in giving what we need, but in a pale reflection of the real, making us always thirsty for a ‘real’ which will never come.

The variety expressed on the Web is well developed and important and will expand even more, but it seems that the force toward variety turned back into concentration of sources of information, as Nicholar Carr said in an interview for The Sun magazine.

It was once believed that the Web was essentially centrifugal: that it pushed people away from big, central sources of information to millions of small, independent sources scattered throughout the network. But it turns out that centripetal forces – forces that draw us back to the big power centers – are also strong on the Web. Big sites have big advantages, and they seem to get stronger over time. The Net’s Wild West days are coming to an end. The trend now is more toward the consolidation of traffic and power than toward their diffusion.

Our choices about information can come from our depth if we allow ourselves to sense our very depth. The more we swallow information the less we are able to make real choices. We can’t make real choices because we don’t listen to ourselves; and we don’t listen to ourselves because the capacity of our inner attentional muscles is never exercised and it becomes weak by attending only external inputs mostly of short bits of information with no broad view. When we can’t approach our inner self or when the very habit of looking inside becomes weakened, we can only consign our choices to the mass or perhaps just to the faster website. In this way we identity more with the contents of information poured into our minds and less with our essential qualities.

One of the mantras of the Internet is that there aren’t barriers of social status, religion, country, ideology. This is true of our possibility to access any kind of information on the Net, but the more we identity ourselves with our mind’s contents, the more we erect defenses against extraneous information which would shake our mind’s structures and therefore our very identity. The real broadening of the mind can happen when we don’t identify with our mind’s beliefs and ideas, but with our felt inner qualities which are being supported by the observation of our mind’s processes and by the acceptance of the emptiness of our mind.

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After a series of resistances to Facebook I experimented with the social network in the last few months. The first resistance was about presenting a “self” of mine, the same for all people in my friends’ list. This created some perplexity for me. I like the variety of human beings and have always mixed with people of the most variety: adventurers, hippies, artists, travelers, therapists, entrepreneurs, scholars, rich, poor and creative mixes of those natures. My self, being composed of a mix of different personalities, tends to show different facets of my nature where these can find correspondence. Inevitably, this creates more intimate and personalized relationships but at the same time they are limited by a subset of our personality.

With Facebook and the public profile which widely embraces our personality, I was afraid of not being recognized “for what I am” by some individuals. It reminded me of One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the latest novel and a masterpiece of Luigi Pirandello. Basically we are “One,” but for the majority of people we are not “No One,” while in front of the multitude of people who know us, we are “One Hundred Thousand.” We are a different person in the eyes of each person. Without going to the spiritual level where we can say that actually all of us are “nobody” and “everything” at the same time, remaining on the levels of the personality construction and object relationships, Facebook is an interesting experiment.

On the Net we are often anonymous in many spheres: in our Web surfing, in social networks and in forums, we mostly use identities which do not identify us precisely. Facebook is an attempt to reunify the various personalities and to give a center of consciousness to the fragmentation of the online personality. It is an attempt to overcome – even though limited to the digital area – the various object relationships. Facebook can represent an evolution of the adolescent search of one’s own personality, a stage when there are attempts to give ourselves an identity through experimenting with life and people and often hiding behind anonymity.

So, here I am with my “real me” on Facebook, the same in front of everybody, unifying the pieces of my history and therefore the pieces of my psyche. What will it be like, this public “me”? As a lowest common multiple where my relationships and human qualities can be creatively expanded through sharing with friends, or will it be as a highest common factor where only the common qualites will be kept, the ones which most people can accept? It seemed to me sometimes the former at other times the latter.

When in the offline community human relationships are evermore distant and formalized, where almost the whole territory has been turned into a cement jungle, where non-commercial places for meeting are becoming rare, where the time for real meetings itself becomes absorbed more and more by technological gadgets, Facebook has arrived to the rescue for helping us to find again the sense of belonging and to keep in touch in contact with people.

The first thing which struck me was that Facebook proposed to me to update my status writing in the third person: “Ivo…,” which I could have completed with “has gone to the beach,” “has had lunch with friends,” “is writing an article,” etc. We write this way in the perspective of others, to be seen and read. The third person has a double function. From the one hand to present oneself in the third person supports the inner observation. The very fact of presenting oneself from the point of view of others helps the awareness of ourselves. On the other hand, speaking in the third person can feed the ego even further, maybe for the very fact that in speaking of ourselves we are feeding an attention which is not that of inner observation, but that of the ravenous ego to be seen and recognized.

After a couple of months the initial proposal became, “What’s on your mind?” Facebook is giving more importance to the “Twitter-like” functions, stimulating the flow of daily messages almost in real time. The way of meditation is to let the thoughts pass by, not becoming attached to them. After years of working on myself, one of the few things I have learnt is that the mind excretes thoughts continuously, that the vast majority of them are not interesting and most of them do not even belong to us. Most thoughts present themselves in the form of conditionings and repeating others’ words and thoughts, with few variations on the theme. Now that I start to attach less to my thoughts, letting them flow with a certain indifference, here comes Facebook which elevates them to the “news of the day” ranking. Well…

Anyway, I played around a bit with Facebook, wrote some notes, gave links and uploaded photos of my travels. Once I was on a tropical island, taking pictures and thinking of how I would have presented them on Facebook. Instead of living the situation totally, I was thinking of how to picture it and how to present it inside a media, moving away from the direct experience on many levels. Even the mind which interferes is a part of the totality of experience and I accept it with great pleasure, but when it exaggerates, I put it aside in a corner.

I remember when I was a child and when something interesting was happening, sometimes the adults would tell me, “Oh…think of when you’ll tell this to your friends (or at home).” It used to make me mad because it got me out of the flow, whether I was playing or watching a show. For many years I did not take pictures of my trips and in some way if I have started doing it since the last few years, it is also due to the pressure of sharing them through the Internet.

Every time I connect to Facebook I browse the flow of my friends’ updates. There are those who write several notes in a day, those who seldom write, there are funny or serious appeals, a female friend of mine writes, “Something is dying inside….”If she writes it in a public way it is a desire for sharing, but it is strange to see this message running with dozens of other signals mostly ordinary and often banal. I know something about this friend’s life; it wouldn’t be appropriate to reply in public for asking further details but at the same time I would not want to use Facebook as a platform email for sending a personal message. In this manner we enter Facebook for continuing a talk which can happen much more easily through ordinary email. I choose not to send any comment or message in Facebook, reserving myself for communication with her in other ways (by Internet, through IM or email because we live in different nations). I also ask myself if I am avoiding deeper contact, being in my turn taken over by the avalanche of superficiality.

Using Facebook I tend to decrease individual contact. More than communicating I found that I was broadcasting, transmitting to an audience. Almost every day the audience increases, the number of friends expands. The effect is seductive and gratifying for the ego, but it is a different thing to communicate to a public rather than to a single person. With each of them there is a unique story and a unique relationship. Of course, it is possible to send personalized messages by Facebook too but for this purpose a mailer program is better, while the structure of Facebook gives more emphasis to broadcasting. As a mailer I use Eudora, an old software, but still functional and “ecological,” which works even with a slow Internet connection or through a mobile phone connection. Differently, it is almost impossible to open Facebook pages with a connection which is not ADSL to send just a private message.

I have noticed that after about 50 “friends” the flow of messages becomes such that it leads to loss of sense and value. I tend to scroll the messages with the mouse as if they were newspaper items. As when in some countries everybody is hooting on the road, the meaning of the signal gets lost, hearing gets anesthetized and it becomes only a background. McLuhan had noticed how technologies and the media become as much an extension as an amputation of the body/mind’s faculties.

The nature of the mind is such that after some time it erases any interest; through the repetition of the stimulus less attention is given to the same type of input. The mind chases novelties. The same happens to me with the feed of the blog I read. As soon as a blog has been discovered I follow its articles with interest, then tend to look through them quickly. I would not want to “evaporate” my friends’ messages in the same way.

Giving news regarding myself on Facebook makes me become lazier and having an excuse for not contacting people personally. And what about those who aren’t on Facebook? Most of my friends are not on Facebook and sometimes they do not even use the Internet. Since there is a limit to the time which one can dedicate to communications, those inevitably get penalized.

The really important news of my friends, including those who are on Facebook, anyway did not come through Facebook: they reached me by direct contact, on the phone or by email. In any case I’ll play the game of Facebook more, but I could decide to stop at any moment by sending a note to my contacts. Apart from the above-mentioned reason, it would be enough for me not to be connected to a fast Internet line for some time to make me lose the will to wait for minutes for looking through mostly banalities, with all the respect I have for my friends.

Facebook undoubtedly is the best engineered social network site, nevertheless I foresee the fall of its popularity as it has happened with other very popular sites such as Second Life or MySpace. Facebook will be more persistent than the others because it is linked to people we know in real life. But as the mind has constructed the game of Facebook, the mind will dismantle it. The mind loses interest about everything, especially if something remains only on the mental plane. Facebook’s strength consists in being a bridge between the purely mental world and the world of real relationships. In this reciprocal exchange between the virtual and the real on one hand some virtual meetings can be “real-ized” but on the other hand real people can be “virtualized,” reducing them in our psyche to a small icon and a flow of bytes which scroll on the screen. Similarly, various appeals and different causes risk counting in the real world as much as a discussion between prisoners during the air hour.

All of what I have written was without considering the problems connected to privacy – which would be an alarming separate chapter.

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Scientists have come close to the possibility of erasing a one-month-old guinea pig’s memories. A protein called α-CaMKII is involved in the storing and regaining of memory.

In particular, researchers increased the levels of this protein at the moment when the guinea pigs remembered the pain consequent to a shock. This increase caused dissipation of the memory connected to the shock, and not just temporarily. The memory seems to be completely lost, as if the fact had never happened. Possible applications of this research are seen in overcoming memories of painful traumas.

Apart from the risk of engineering soldiers who can commit any brutality and forget it chemically, this approach to traumatic memories is a mechanical type without a holistic vision of human beings. The idea is still about having a war against something, as with medicine (“the war against cancer”, against microorganisms, etc.) instead of becoming aware of it.

Memories and traumas enter every cell of the body, and I have an impression that it will probably be possible to inhibit access to a certain memory, but it will not remove its energetic charge in the person. The extreme precision of awareness can act in a way that memories are not removed but are integrated into wider acceptance which becomes part of our experience and growth.

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Gli scienziati si sono avvicinati alla possibilità di cancellare nelle cavie i ricordi di un mese precedente. Una proteina di nome α-CaMKII  è coinvolta nella memorizzazione e nel recupero delle memorie.

In particolare, i ricercatori hanno aumentato i livelli di tale proteina nel momento in cui le cavie ricordavano il dolore conseguente ad uno shock. Questo aumento ha portato alla dissipazione della memoria legata allo shock, non solo temporaneamente. La memoria sembra persa completamente, come se il fatto non fosse mai avvenuto. Le applicazioni possibili di questa ricerca vengono viste nel superamento dei traumi dolorosi.

A parte il rischio di trovarsi con dei soldati che possono compiere qualsiasi efferatezza e dimenticarla chimicamente, questo approccio verso i ricordi traumatici è di nuovo di tipo meccanico/organico senza una visione d’insieme dell’essere. L’idea è ancora quella di fare la guerra a qualcosa, come avviene per la medicina (“la guerra contro il cancro”, contro i microorganismi, ecc…) invece che prenderne consapevolezza.

Il ricordo ed i traumi entrano in tutte le cellule del corpo e la mia impressione è che si potrà forse anche inibire l’accesso ad un certo ricordo, ma questo non toglierà la sua carica energetica nella persona.  L’estrema precisione della consapevolezza può far sì che il ricordo non venga rimosso ma che venga integrato in una accettazione più ampia che lo rende parte della nostra esperienza e crescita.

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A few months ago I applied for the 23andme report on DNA analysis. I received a test tube at home, filled it with my saliva, sent the sample and after a few weeks received an email which informed me that the data were ready. I went to the 23andme website with a mix of curiosity and apprehension to see my characteristics and the risks on a medical level.

In the health and traits and the various medical research reports I have confirmation concerning my health. In my DNA there are some genes which lead to a high probability of ankylosing spondilitis, which I’ve had since I was 16 years. This is an autoimmune disease which causes inflammation in the joints and, which sometimes can become invalidating. Curiously, while some of the research gave me a high probability of contracting it, another gives me only a minor probability. Perhaps this could explain the fact that the typical degeneration of the disease has stopped at a non-advanced stage, even if it is always a source of inconvenience. It could be that the genes get activated and deactivated due to circumstances which are not clear.

It is typical of this problem to have phases of activation and remissions even lasting for a long time, where medical science doesn’t know the reasons for it. Since I never took synthetic medicine at a systemic level for my problem, I can suppose that natural medicines and awareness practices had their role in the improving of symptoms, even more so since I had an important remission after having relived some traumas of the past in the form of inner awareness. But those are hypotheses.

Among other things 23andme tells me that I have a tendency toward obesity. This needs at least “more studies.” I have always been thin, all my life. I have a bit more weight now, at the age of 47, but being 1.75 cm (5′ 10″) tall and weighing 62 kg (136 lb), I remain fundamentally slim and fit, with a fast metabolism and hardly accumulate fat.

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Qualche mese addietro mi sono iscritto al servizio di 23andme per l’analisi del DNA. Mi è arrivata la provetta a casa, l’ho riempita di saliva, ho spedito il campione e dopo qualche settimana mi arriva una email dicendo che i dati sono pronti. Con curiosità e una leggera apprensione entro nel sito web per vedere le mie caratteristiche e i rischi a livello medico.

Negli aspetti legati alla salute e nei vari report di ricerca medica ho una conferma rispetto alla mia salute. Nel mio DNA vi sono dei geni che danno un’alta probabilità per la spondilite, che ho da quando ho 16 anni. Questa è una malattia autoimmune che porta infiammazione alle articolazioni, e talvolta può diventare invalidante. Curiosamente, mentre alcuni studi mi danno una maggior probabilità di contrarla, un altro addirittura mi dà una minore probabilità. Questo potrebbe forse spiegare il fatto che la degenerazione tipica della malattia si è fermata ad uno stadio non avanzato, pur essendo comunque una fonte di disagio. Potrebbe essere che i geni si attivano e si disattivano a seconda di circostanze non chiare.

E’ tipico di questi problemi avere fasi di attivazione e di remissione anche di lungo periodo, di cui la scienza medica non ne conosce le cause. Poiché non ho mai assunto farmaci di sintesi a livello sistemico per il mio problema, posso supporre che i farmaci naturali e le pratiche di consapevolezza possano avere avuto un ruolo nel miglioramento dei sintomi, tanto più che ho avuto un’importante remissione dopo aver ri-vissuto, in forma di consapevolezza interiore, alcuni traumi del passato. Ma sono ipotesi.

Tra le altre cose, 23andme mi dice che ho una tendeza all’obesità. Qui proprio non ci siamo, sono stato piuttosto magro per tutta la vita. A 47 anni sono un po’ “ingrassato”, ma con 1,75 cm di altezza per 62 Kg, rimango fondamentalmente asciutto, con un metabolismo veloce e molto difficilmente accumulo grassi.

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Neuroscientist Gary Small, co-author with Gigi Vorga of iBrain: Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind writes:

Teenagers desire instant gratification – they want to satisfy their needs and do it now, not later. Their underdeveloped frontal lobes often impair their everyday judgment. Many teens feel they are invincible – danger will bounce off them. Today’s obsession with computer technology and video gaming appears to be stunting frontal lobe development in many teenagers, impairing their social and reasoning abilities. If young people continue to mature in this fashion, their brains’ neural pathways may never catch up. It is possible that they could remain locked into a neural circuitry that stays at an immature and self-absorbed emotional level, right through adulthood.

Then he writes that when we act in a way that gratifies our needs instantly, the brain’s emotional centers, the parts of the brain which aren’t able to plan for the future, take over.

What’s the role of the frontal lobes? From Wikipedia:

The frontal lobe reaches full maturity around age 25, marking the cognitive maturity associated with adulthood. Arthur Toga, UCLA, found increased myelin in the frontal lobe white matter of young adults compared to that of teens. A typical onset of schizophrenia in early adult years correlates with poorly myelinated and thus inefficient connections between cells in the fore-brain…The frontal lobe contains most of the dopamine-sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex. The dopamine system is associated with reward, attention, long-term memory, planning, and drive. Dopamine tends to limit and select sensory information arriving from the thalamus to the fore-brain. A report from the National Institute of Mental Health says a gene variant that reduces dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex is related to poorer performance and inefficient functioning of that brain region during working memory tasks, and to slightly increased risk for schizophrenia…The executive functions of the frontal lobes involve the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social responses, and determine similarities and differences between things or events. Therefore, it is involved in higher mental functions.

If there’s a time in history where a long-term vision is needed, it’s now. Both in the environmental and financial areas we are going to pay the cost heavily for a short-term view. Environmentally, we exploited the planet’s resources as if they were infinite with a very short-term view of the consequences of our decisions.

Financially, the credit craze privileged the consumption today over the bill tomorrow, putting the whole system in a mess which nobody knows if and when it will ever recover. Without a well-developed frontal lobe, the higher mental faculties of long-term planning are substituted by short-term childish gratification.

The frontal lobes “determine similarities and differences between things or events.” It seems that the frontal lobes integrate the qualities of clear mental discrimination, which allows us to make subtle distinctions and to recognize the truth.

On a spiritual plane, “discriminating awareness” is an important mental quality to develop in the path toward an expanded awareness. Even though the qualities of mental discrimination are going to be overcome in the advanced stages of the path, those stages can’t be bypassed. While the absence of mental discrimination in an enlightened being means joining a larger awareness which doesn’t depend on the conceptual mind any more, in a person who didn’t train his mind and soul it means a schizophrenic state.

Without well-developed frontal lobes in the population, political leaders can easily manipulate truth, gain approvals with highly emotive messages and contradict themselves often – with no consequences. If people can’t see the big picture any more, focusing only on the last novelty with a weak memory, there’s not even any need any more by states to threaten the freedom of the press. Simply, people won’t be bothered by consistency and truth any more. Then promises and declarations by politicians can be disproved without even being noticed.

Damage to the frontal lobes include distractibility, poor attention and poor memory. Those damages also cause inability to plan ahead and indifference to people and the world around, alternated with euphoric and uninhibited behaviors. Those symptoms are related to physical damage to the frontal lobes and it would be going too far to apply them to the use of technology: however there’s a strong resemblance of those symptoms with Internet addiction or with attention deficit disorder.

Many pediatrics associations suggest to parents to avoid video technology in the first 2 years of age, while the Waldorf education method refrains from exposing a child to technology till much later to respect the cognitive and emotional development of children. Without need of brain scans and neurotechnological tools, the mystical sensitivity is able to connect with the inner nature of the mind.

If frontal lobe development is being stunted in young people by the massive use of technology there’s little surprise that those symptoms are rising in young people as well as in older people who have already had their frontal lobes developed, on different levels of intensity. On a widespread level, with the fast pace of technology, more and more people experience difficulties in concentrating on a long task, as for instance in reading books.

So will the world resemble Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where society was structured in such a way that every desire was satisfied in a short time? In case of unpleasurable feelings, there was soma, the perfect drug with no side effects.

I feel the conflict between short- and long-term goals will be at the center stage in the next few years, as well as the one between the mind frames for specialization versus seeing the whole picture. System theory and the science of complexity are important developments toward a vision of reality which takes complex interactions into consideration, but basically they are founded on the same thought modalities of specialization and reductionism.

For instance, now we have much more knowledge of the complex environmental interactions but we are still far from seeing the whole picture. Like the search for the elementary particles, there will probably be no end in that knowledge. Though the more we progress in environmental knowledge, if we just rely on information, the more we risk making bigger disasters looking for “solutions,” as in the geo-engineering proposals to “hack and fix the planet” in order to reverse global warming.

We can probably find good advice in ancient Taoist, American Indian, or just philosophies of organic farmers on how to interact as human beings with nature and, it would be much better if we join those philosophies with scientific data.

What is needed in the complex world is to conjoin the science of complexity with a sensitive intellect connected both to the inner world of the soul and the outer world. An intellect which can pierce reality and thoughts, with an intuitive and large vision, a kind of wisdom which allows wise people to know the depth of reality through direct contact.

See also:

Social networking and instant fulfillment

Saving time through technology

Metabolizing information

Mental territories

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Il neuroscienziato Gary Small, co-autore con Gigi Vorga di iBrain: Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind scrive:

Gli adolescenti vogliono una gratificazione immediata – vogliono soddisfare i loro bisogni e lo vogliono ora, non dopo. I loro lobi frontali sottosviluppati spesso deteriorano le capacità di giudizio. Molti adolescenti si sentono invincibili – i pericoli non li toccheranno. L’ossessione odierna con le tecnologie del computer ed i videogame sembra arrestare la crescita del lobi frontali in molti adolescenti, deteriorando le loro capacità cognitive e di ragionamento. Se i giovani continuano a maturare in questo modo, potrebbe essere che i percorsi neurali dei loro cervelli non vengano mai sviluppati. E’ possibile che rimangano bloccati in un immaturo circuito neurale, assorbiti da se stessi a livello emozionale, fino all’età adulta.

Quindi scrive che quando agiamo in modo da gratificare i nostri bisogni istantaneamente, i centri emozionali del cervello, le parti che non sono in grado di pianificare il futuro, prendono il sopravvento. Qual è il ruolo dei lobi frontali? Dalla versione inglese di Wikipedia:

I lobi frontali raggiungono la piena maturità circa a 25 anni, dando la maturità cognitiva associata all’essere adulti. Arthur Toga, UCLA, ha scoperto un’accresciuta mielinizzazione (sostanza che avvolge la fibra del nervo, NDA) nei lobi frontali dei cervelli dei giovani adulti a confronto con quelli degli adolescenti. Un tipico inizio di schizofrenia nei giovani adulti è associato ad una scarsa mielinizzazione e quindi una connessione inefficiente tra le cellule della porzione anteriore del cervello… I lobi frontali contengono la maggior parte dei neuroni sensibili alla dopamina nella corteccia cerebrale. Il sistema dopaminico è associato con la ricompensa, l’attenzione, la memoria a lungo termine, la pianificazione e la motivazione. La dopamina tende a limitare ed a selezionare le informazioni sensoriali che arrivano dal talamo alla porzione anteriore del cervello. Un rapporto del National Institute of Mental Health afferma che una variante genetica che riduce l’attività della dopamina nella corteccia prefrontale è collegata a una performance scarsa e inefficiente in quella ragione del cervello a livello delle capacità di memoria, ed è collegata ad una certo rischio di schizofrenia… Le funzioni esecutive dei lobi frontali coinvolgono la capacità di riconoscere le conseguenze future che risultano dalle azioni correnti, la capacità di scegliere tra azioni buone e non buone (o migliori), sopprimere risposte socialmente non accettabili, e determinare le somiglianze tra cose ed eventi. Quindi, è coinvolto nelle funzioni mentali elevate.

Se c’è un tempo nella storia dove è benvenuta una visione di lungo termine, questo è ora. Sia nelle aree ambientali che finanziarie stiamo pagando il pesante costo di una visione e breve termine. A livello ambientale abbiamo sfruttato le risorse del pianeta come se fossero infinite con una visione di brevissimo termine sulle conseguenze delle nostre decisioni.

A livello finanziario, la follia del credito ha privilegiato il consumo oggi sulla bolletta di domani, ponendo l’intero sistema in un caos dove nessuno sa se quando potrà riprendere il suo corso, se mai potrà. Senza i lobi frontali sviluppati, le facoltà mentali superiori di pianificazione a lungo termine vengono sostituite da un’infantile gratificazione di breve termine.

I lobi frontali “determinano le somiglianze tra cose ed eventi”. Pare che i lobi frontali integrino le qualità di chiara discriminazione mentale, che ci consente di fare delle sottili distinzioni e di riconoscere il vero.

Su un piano spirituale “la consapevolezza discriminante” è una qualità mentale importante in un percorso verso una consapevolezza espansa. Anche se le qualità di consapevolezza discriminante andranno superate nelle fasi avanzate del percorso, tali fasi non possono essere saltate. Mentre l’assenza di discriminazione mentale in un essere illuminato significa l’unione con una consapevolezza più ampia che non dipende più dalla mente concettuale, in una persona che non ha preparato la sua mente, porta ad uno stato schizofrenico.

Senza lobi frontali sviluppati nella popolazione, i leader politici possono facilmente manipolare la verità, catturare consensi con messaggi ad alto contenuto emotivo e contraddirre se stessi frequentemente, senza alcuna conseguenza. Se le persone non sono più in grado di vedere le cose in prospettiva, e si focalizzano solo sull’ultima novità con una scarsa memoria, non c’è neanche più la necessità da parte degli stati di minacciare la libertà di stampa. Le persone non saranno semplicemente più interessate alla coerenza o al vero. Le promesse e le dichiarazioni dei politic potranno essere confutate senza che questo venga neanche notato.

I danni ai lobi frontali includono distrazione, scarsa attenzione e scarsa memoria. Questi portano inoltre incapacità di pianificare il futuro ed indifferenza alle persone e al mondo circostante, alternato a comportamenti euforini e disinibiti. Questi sintomi sono collegati a danni fisici dei lobi frontali e sarebbe aecessivo applicarl all’uso della tecnologia, comunque c’è una forte somiglianza tra tali sintomi e la dipendenza da Internet o il deficit d’attenzione.

Molte associazioni di pediatri suggeriscono ai genitori di evitare le tecnologie video nei primi due anni di vita, mentre il metodo di educazione Waldorf di Steiner suggerisce di non esporre un bimbo verso la tecnologia per un numero maggiore di anni, per rispettare il suo sviluppo cognitivo ed emotivo. Senza necessità di scansioni cerebrali e di strumenti neurotecnologici, la sensibilità del mistico può connettersi con la natura interiore della mente.

Se la crescita dei lobi frontali viene arrestata nei giovani a causa del massiccio uso di tecnologie, non c’è da sorprendersi se tali sintomi siano in crescita sia nei giovani che nelle persone meno giovani che hanno già avuto uno sviluppo dei lobi frontali, a diversi livelli di intensità. Su un piano generale, con il ritmo veloce della tecnologia, un numero ctrescente di persone ha difficoltà nel concentrarsi in un compito di lunga durata, come ad esempio nella lettura di un libro.

Quindi il mondo assomiglierà a Il mondo nuovo di Aldous Huxley, dove la società era concepita in modo che qualsiasi desiderio potesse essere soddisfatto in breve tempo? In caso di emozioni spiacevoli, c’era il soma, la droga perfetta senza effetti collaterali.

Credo che il conflitto tra obiettivi a breve e lungo termine sarà centrale nei prossimi anni, analogamente a quello tra le strutture mentali che portano alla specializzazione rispetto al vedere le cose in una più ampia prospettiva. La teoria dei sistemi e la scienza della complessità sono stati degli sviluppi importanti verso una visione della realtà che prende in considerazione le interazioni complesse, ma si basano sulle stesse modalità di pensiero della specializzazione e del riduzionismo.

Ad esempio, ora abbiamo molte più conoscenze sulle interazioni complesse ambientali ma siamo lontani dall’avere un’immagine completa di queste. Come per la ricerca delle particelle elementari, probabilmente non vi sarà fine a tale conoscenza. Tuttavia, più facciamo progressi nella conoscenza ambientale, se facciamo solo riferimento alle informazioni, aumentiamo il rischio di produrre dei disastri maggiori nella ricerca di “soluzioni” come nelle proposte di geoingegneria per “hackerizzare e mettere a posto il pianeta” per far fronte al riscaldamento globale.

Probabilmente possiamo prendere dei buoni suggerimenti dall’antico Taoismo, dagli Indiani d’America o dalle filosofie dei contadini biologici su come interagire con la natura come esseri umani, e sarebbe molto più efficare se potessimo combinare tali filosofie con i dati scientifici.

Ciò che serve nel mondo complesso è l’unione della scienza della complessità con un intelletto sensibile, connesso sia al mondo interiore che a quello esterno. Un intelletto che possa penetrare la realtà ed i pensieri, con una visione ampia ed intuitiva, un tipo di saggezza che consente di conoscere le profondità della realtà tramite un contatto diretto.

Vedi anche:

I social network e l’appagamento immediato

Risparmiare tempo con la tecnologia

Metabolizzare le informazioni

Territori mentali

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The New York Times’s article Is Social Networking Killing You? quotes the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield telling the Daily Mail about social networking:

My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.

I already wrote about her in No identity and I appreciate her efforts in advising people about the inner transformations caused by technology.

When, in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the governor asked youths if they never faced a difficulty which couldn’t be overcome and had to endure a long time between a desire and its fulfillment, after some silence (during which the director started to become nervous while waiting), one of them confessed that once he had to wait almost four weeks before a woman whom he was attracted to conceded herself to him. The strong feeling associated with the waiting was “horrible” according both to the youngster and the governor, which the latter added that our ancient people were so stupid that, when the first reformers came to save them from those horrible feelings, they would reject them.

In Huxley’s Brave New World people were conditioned even before being born and life was engineered in such a way that every desire was satisfied in a short time. In case of unpleasurable feelings, there was soma, the perfect drug with no side effects.

The whole world of technologies revolves around avoiding idle time and silence. Waiting became equivalent to frustration and efficiency and speed are the qualities most cherished in technological fields. Internet technology brought the tendency to speed to new levels, which was already present in traditional media like radio or TV, where pauses or silences are consciously avoided. I don’t have a TV since a long time, but in the rare cases I do see it, I notice a progressive acceleration in editing and switches of context, with a drive to avoid vacant spaces, short though they may be.

The Internet experience, even though interactive, is even more extreme in this trend. Our attention is split between different applications which produce much input and flow of information which interact faster and faster with our clicks.

But the most fulfilling human experiences need a certain time to be internalized. To enter the flow of a dance, in making love and in meditation, time is needed. Looking for instant fulfillment is a childish peculiarity. The ability to hold and feel frustration is a gym to bring awareness to our feelings and to create a bigger container for them.

In one spiritual workshop I experienced the association between the activation of the shakti energy of kundalini and frustration. The activation of energy is modulated by the capacity to feel frustration and, staying in it without acting it out to discharge it.

In a certain way, meditation itself is an exercise in acceptance and awareness of frustration. There are few things as frustrating as sitting without doing anything and observing thoughts arising, sometimes trivial or boring, at other times associated with impatience or with feelings difficult to hold. Ecstatic states can be achieved during meditation as well, but, usually after that, some inner knots get melted in the form of awareness.

Technologies avoid reflective time and tend to minimize the gaps between a want and its fulfillment, causing irritation when there isn’t a quick response to our inputs, feeding the persistance of a childish attitude toward reality this way.

However, the quest for a null gap between a desire and its fulfillment reminds me of the condition described by spiritually realized people who, living in the “here and now,” don’t have any separation between what the mind desires and reality. There is a synchronization with reality, where the mind doesn’t filter any more what should be from what we want. Since there isn’t anybody any more who wants anything, the alignment with reality is total. Those states are not exclusive for enlightened people, but everybody gets a glance of them, even though for a short time. Somehow, looking for evermore speed at a technological level shows the need, limited to the mind’s plane, to enter the continuous flux which cancels frustration and desires themselves.

Anyway, on the mind’s plane, for as much as we can reach more speed (and if fact is the goal of most technological development), frustration is not going to disappear: rather, the quest for fulfillment becomes evermore greedy in a mechanism which reminds one of addiction. The mind, in itself, won’t ever have enough desires, information, or speed. Somehow the mind looks for the liberation of the desires/frustration couple, seeking immediate fulfillment, but finds instead reiteration and their multiplication.

See also:

Information Dopaminated

Taking away attention

Disembodying at broadband speed

Computer addiction as survival for the ego

Multitasking to nothing

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L’articolo del New York Times Is Social Networking Killing You? cita le parole della neuroscienziata Susan Greenfield al Daily Mail a riguardo dei social network:

Il mio timore è che queste tecnologie portano ad un’infantilizzazione del cervello in uno stato simile a quello dei bambini piccoli che vengono attratti da ronzii e da luci brillanti, con una scarsa capacità di concentrazione e che vivono al momento.

Avevo già scritto a riguardo della Greenfield in Senza identità ed apprezzo i suoi sforzi nel mettere in guardia sulle trasformazioni interiori causate dalla tecnologia.

Quando, ne Il mondo nuovo di Aldous Huxley, il governatore chiese ai giovani se non avessero mai incontrato un ostacolo insormontabile e subire un  lungo intervallo di tempo tra la coscienza di un desiderio e il suo compimento, dopo un certo silenzio (durante il quale il direttore iniziò ad innervosirsi per l’attesa) uno dei giovani disse” Una volta dovetti attendere quasi quattro settimane prima che una ragazza ch’io desideravo mi si concedesse”. Il governatore quindi chiese “E avete provato, di conseguenza, una forte emozione?” “Orribile!” disse il ragazzo. “Orribile; precisamente” disse il Governatore. “I nostri antichi erano talmente stupidi e corti di vista che, quando vennero i primi riformatori e si offersero di salvarli da quelle orribili emozioni, non vollero aver niente a che fare con essi.”

Ne Il mondo nuovo di Huxley le persone vengono condizionate già prima della nascita e la vita era congegnata in modo che ogni desiderio venisse soddisfatto in tempi brevi. In caso di emozioni spiacevoli c’era a disposizione il soma, la droga perfetta senza effetti collaterali.

Tutto il mondo delle tecnologie è fatto per evitare i tempi morti e il silenzio. Attendere è diventato equivalente a provare frustrazione e la rincorsa all’efficienza e alla velocità sono le qualità più apprezzate in campo tecnologico. La tecnologia di Internet ha portato la tendenza alla velocità a nuovi livelli, già presente nei media tradizionali quali la radio o la televisione, dove vengono evitati  accuratamente le pause ed il silenzio. Pur non possedendo la televisione da tempo, nelle poche volte che mi capita di vederla noto un’accelerazione progressiva nell’editing e nei cambi di contesto, manifestando una volontà di evitare pause e vuoti, per quanto brevi siano.

L’esperienza su Internet, pur se interattiva, è ancora più esasperata in questa direzione. La nostra attenzione è divisa tra diverse applicazioni le quali producono parecchi input e flussi informativi che interagiscono sempre più velocemente con i nostri clic.

Ma le esperienze umane più appaganti richiedono un certo tempo per essere interiorizzate. Per entrare nel flusso della danza, del fare l’amore e della meditazione ci vuole tempo. La ricerca dell’appagamento immediato è una caratteristica infantile. La capacità di contenere e sentire la frustrazione è una palestra per portare consapevolezza alle nostre emozioni e per creare un contenitore sempre più ampio per queste.

In un workshop spirituale ho fatto esperienza dell’associazione tra l’attivazione dell’energia shakti della kundalini e la frustrazione. L’attivazione dell’energia viene modulata dalla capacità di percepire la frustrazione e di stare con questa senza agirla o senza scaricarla.

In un certo senso, la meditazione stessa è un esercizio di accettazione e di consapevolezza della frustrazione. Ci sono poche cose altrettanto frustranti che sedere senza far nulla ed osservare pensieri che emergono, talvolta banali e noiosi, altre volte accompagnati da impazienza o da emozioni difficili da contenere. In meditazione possono giungere anche stati estatici, ma solitamente dopo che si sciolgono alcuni nodi interiori al fuoco della consapevolezza.

Le tecnologie ci evitano ogni pausa di riflessione e tendono a minimizzare gli intervalli tra un desiderio e la sua soddisfazione, causandoci irritazione quando non c’è una risposta rapida ai nostri input, alimentando così il perdurare di un’attitudine immatura verso la realtà.

Ma la ricerca di un intervallo nullo tra un desiderio e il suo appagamento mi ricorda la condizione descritta dagli individui spiritualmente realizzati i quali vivendo nel “qui e ora” non hanno la separazione tra ciò che desidera la mente e la realtà. Ci si “sincronizza” con la realtà dove la mente non filtra ciò che è da ciò che dovrebbe essere, ciò che è da ciò che si vuole. Non essendoci più nessuno che vuole alcunché, l’allineamento con la realtà è totale. Questi stati non sono esclusiva di un illuminati, ma chiunque ne ha fatto esperienza, seppur per un breve tempo. In qualche modo la ricerca di velocità sempre maggiore a livello tecnologico manifesta il bisogno, limitato al piano della mente, di entrare nel flusso continuo che annulla la frustrazione e i desideri stessi.

Tuttavia sul piano della mente, per quanto si possa raggiungere velocità sempre maggiori (e di fatto è lo scopo della maggior parte dello sviluppo tecnologico), la frustrazione non è destinata a sparire, anzi, la ricerca di soddisfacimento diventa sempre più famelica in un meccanismo che ricorda la dipendenza. La mente, in sé, non ne avrà mai a sufficienza di desideri, informazioni, velocità. In qualche modo la mnete cerca la liberazione dall’accoppiata desideri/frustrazione cercandone la soddisfazione immediata ma trova invece la reiterazione e la moltiplicazione degli stessi.

Vedi anche:

Dopaminati di informazioni

La cattura dell’attenzione

Rendendoci incorporei a velocità di banda larga

La dipendenza da computer per la sopravvivenza dell’ego

Il multitasking: strafare per niente

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CyberPsychology & Behavior has presented a study entitled “Alexithymia and Its Relationships with Dissociative Experiences and Internet Addiction in a Nonclinical Sample.”

Alexithymia causes difficulty in understanding, differentiating and communicating emotional states. It is not considered a clinical condition, but a personality trait, shared among more or less 7% of the population, with a slightly greater prevalence of males. The term is relatively recent, being coined by Peter Sifneos in 1973. The subjects usually lack imagination, have little intuition and scarce introspective capacities. One of the predominant characteristics on the relationship level is a limited capacity of having emotional connections with people since they are not able to see both in themselves and in others the shades of emotion, but just obvious ones of “feeling good” or “bad.”

As often happens in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, interpretations of the causes for alexithymia are divided between those who consider the genetic and neurochemical factors as predominant, and those who think that the reasons are to be searched for in psychological factors (for example, too-intensive emotional experiences which lead to defending oneself from them, or lack of recognition of the son’s or daughter’s emotions by the parent).

Another characteristic of alexithymics is an attenuated capacity of controlling their impulses, so much so that some of them discharge the tension caused by the unpleasant inner states by compulsive acts, such as abusing food or substances, or through distorted sexual behavior.

The authors of the study (Domenico De Berardis, Alessandro D’Albenzio, Francesco Gambi, Gianna Sepede, Alessandro Valchera, Chiara M. Conti, Mario Fulcheri, Marilde Cavuto, Carla Ortolani, Rosa Maria Salerno, and Nicola Serroni e Filippo Maria Ferro) worked on a sample of 312 students, identifying the factors associated with the risks of developing Internet addiction.

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CyberPsychology & Behavior ha presentato uno studio dal titolo (tradotto) “Alexitimia e la sua relazione con le esperienze dissociative e la dipendenza da Internet in un campione non clinico”

L’alexitimia è la difficoltà a comprendere, a differenziare e comunicare gli stati emozionali. Non è considerata una condizione clinica, ma un tratto della personalità, condiviso da circa il 7% della popolazione, con una leggera prevalenza di soggetti maschili. Il termine è relativamente recente, essendo stato coniato da Peter Sifneos nel 1973. Questi soggetti di solito hanno una vita fantasiosa carente, poca intuizione e una scarsa capacità introspettiva. Una delle caratteristiche predominanti a livello relazionale è un’altrettanto scarsa capacità di rapportarsi emotivamente con il prossimo in quanto incapaci di vedere in sé e negli altri le sfumature emozionali al di là di quelle grossolane quali “benessere” o “malessere”.

Come spesso succede nel campo della psicologia e della psichiatria, le interpretazioni sulle cause della alexitimia si dividono in chi ritiene che i fattori genetici e neurochimici siano predominanti e in chi invece ritiene che le cause siano da trovarsi nei fattori psicologici (ad esempio, esperienze emotive troppo intense che hanno portato a difendersi da queste, oppure una mancanza di riconoscimento delle emozioni del figlio/a da parte dei genitori).

Un’altra caratteristica degli alexitimici è l’attenuata capacità di controllo degli impulsi, tanto che alcuni scaricano la tensione degli stati interiori sgradevoli con atti compulsivi quali l’abuso di cibo o di sostanze oppure tramite comportamenti sessuali distorti.

Gli autori dello studio, Domenico De Berardis, Alessandro D’Albenzio, Francesco Gambi, Gianna Sepede, Alessandro Valchera, Chiara M. Conti, Mario Fulcheri, Marilde Cavuto, Carla Ortolani, Rosa Maria Salerno, Nicola Serroni e Filippo Maria Ferro, hanno lavorato su un campione di 312 studenti, identificando i fattori associati con i rischi di sviluppare la dipendenza da Internet. E’ stato rilevato che gli alexitimici avevano più esperienze dissociative, una minore autostima, più disturbi di tipo ossessivo-compulsivo e un maggiore potenziale di sviluppare la dipendenza da Internet. In particolare, lo studio ha rilevato che la difficoltà nell’identificare le emozioni è associata in modo significativo ad un rischio più elevato di sviluppare la dipendenza da Internet.

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Wired author Ryan Singel wrote an article about the Huffington Post “being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.” Singel quotes Moser, an editor at alternative weekly Chicago Reader, saying:

If the future of journalism – which everyone keeps telling me The Huffington Post represents – is a bunch of search-engine optimization scams, we have bigger problems than Sam Zell’s bad investment strategies.

Let me quote Plato in Phaedrus:

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Nobody challenges the importance of letters in our world any more, not even philosophers who use them for elaborating their thoughts. Socrates was not an ordinary philosopher, but a wise and enlightened man who reached spiritual heights beyond conceptual thoughts.

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L’autore della rivista Wired Ryan Singel ha scritto un articolo a proposito dello Huffington Post, un famoso blog di informazione “accusato di scorrette pratiche commerciali da alcune pubblicazioni minori che affermano che il sito copia e pubblica ingiustamente i loro contenuti”. Singel cita Moser, un editor del settimanale Chicago Reader che afferma:

Se il futuro del giornalismo, che tutti quanti dicono che lo Huffington Post rappresenta, è un insieme di trucchi e truffe per ottimizzare gli accessi per i motori di ricerca, abbiamo dei problemi enormi.

Vorrei citare Platone nel Fedro:

Socrate: Ho sentito dunque raccontare che presso Naucrati, in Egitto, c’era uno degli antichi dèi del luogo, al quale era sacro l’uccello che chiamano ibis; il nome della divinità era Theuth. Questi inventò dapprima i numeri, il calcolo, la geometria e l’astronomia, poi il gioco della scacchiera e dei dadi, infine anche la scrittura. Re di tutto l’Egitto era allora Thamus e abitava nella grande città della regione superiore che i Greci chiamano Tebe Egizia, mentre chiamano il suo dio Ammone. Theuth, recatosi dal re, gli mostrò le sue arti e disse che dovevano essere trasmesse agli altri Egizi; Thamus gli chiese quale fosse l’utilità di ciascuna di esse, e mentre Theuth le passava in rassegna, a seconda che gli sembrasse parlare bene oppure no, ora disapprovava, ora lodava. Molti, a quanto si racconta, furono i pareri che Thamus espresse nell’uno e nell’altro senso a Theuth su ciascuna arte, e sarebbe troppo lungo ripercorrerli; quando poi fu alla scrittura, Theuth disse: «Questa conoscenza, o re, renderà gli Egizi più sapienti e più capaci di ricordare, poiché con essa è stato trovato il farmaco della memoria e della sapienza».
Allora il re rispose: «Ingegnosissimo Theuth, c’è chi sa partorire le arti e chi sa giudicare quale danno o quale vantaggio sono destinate ad arrecare a chi intende servirsene. Ora tu, padre della scrittura, per benevolenza hai detto il contrario di quello che essa vale. Questa scoperta infatti, per la mancanza di esercizio della memoria, produrrà nell’anima di coloro che la impareranno la dimenticanza, perché fidandosi della scrittura ricorderanno dal di fuori mediante caratteri estranei, non dal di dentro e da se stessi; perciò tu hai scoperto il farmaco non della memoria, ma del richiamare alla memoria. Della sapienza tu procuri ai tuoi discepoli l’apparenza, non la verità: ascoltando per tuo tramite molte cose senza insegnamento, crederanno di conoscere molte cose, mentre per lo più le ignorano, e la loro compagnia sarà molesta, poiché sono divenuti portatori di opinione anziché sapienti».

Nessuno mette più in discussione l’importanza della scrittura nel nostro mondo, neanche i filosofi che la usano per l’elaborazione dei loro pensieri. Socrate non era un filosofo qualunque, ma un uomo saggio e illuminato che aveva raggiunto delle vette spirituali al di là del pensiero concettuale.

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