What gets called mental disorder or illness, mild or severe, shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships break down, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated. Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify our mental map of the world. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. We need an accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster and the way an unchanging outlook is maintained is by isolating oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong.



Tuesday 26 January 2010

Online meditation and Wisdom2.0



Think of the Web as an add-on to your brain. When you combine it’s increasing connectivity with the memetic selection of searching you have a partial reflection of how the mind works. What was once a very weak analogy between the brain and computers, is becoming stronger.


Whether your influence over the domain in which selection takes place is greater than you have in your social environment is unclear - it appears that way, but it could be an illusion. However the dangers of too greater specialisation, leading to extreme dependence on a particular environment are very real. The more precisely you search and the more limited your connections, the more you exclude and put blinkers on yourself. Another form of emotional and cognitive isolation.


Equally the stressors in the virtual world often mirror those in the physical one. The idea of applying meditation techniques to the way we use computers and the internet has been taken up by Soren Gordhamer in his book Wisdom2.0
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-2-0-Creative-Constantly-Connected/dp/0061651516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264459010&sr=1-1 Later this year there will be a Wisdom2.0 conference http://www.wisdom2conference.com/

Soren writes columns for The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-gordhamer and Mashable.com http://mashable.com/author/soren-gordhamer/
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