THE UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES OF A FAST-PACED WORLD

We love speed, Bouskill states, but it doesn’t come naturally:

"Our prehistoric brains aren't really built for it, so we invent roller coasters and race cars and supersonic planes, but we get whiplash, carsick, jet-lagged. We didn't evolve to multitask. Rather, we evolved to do one thing with incredible focus, like hunt -- not necessarily with great speed but with endurance for great distance. But now there's a widening gap between our biology and our lifestyles, a mismatch between what our bodies are built for and what we're making them do. It's a phenomenon my mentors have called 'Stone Agers in the fast lane.'"

I find that concept fascinating, especially when you consider how much technology has advanced in the past century alone.

When you consider our ancestors from the Stone Age, they don’t appear that different to you and I. Sure, they wore less clothes and had limited conversational skills, but they also had eyes, a nose, a mouth, arms, legs… and their basic human needs were the same – to eat, drink and procreate for the survival of our species. And they did so without smartphones, FitBits, Bluetooth, video doorbells, cars, jet engines.

As you read this sentence, our world is the most technologically advanced it has ever been. But have our brains and bodies caught up?

As Bouskill rightly points out, if we have technologies that operate at faster and faster rates, why do we still feel so pressed for time? Shouldn’t the devices that allow us to communicate, cook, clean and generally live life at a quicker pace alleviate some of life’s stresses? It would appear not. We haven’t evolved to a state of serenity – our old stresses have simply been replaced with new ones: how quickly we can reply to emails, answer the phone, download that data….

Bouskill explains:

"All of modern history can be thought of as one spurt of acceleration after another. It's as if we think if we just speed up enough, we can outrun our problems. But we never do. We know this in our own lives, and policymakers know it, too.

"So now we're turning to artificial intelligence to help us make faster and smarter decisions to process this ever-expanding universe of data. But machines crunching data are no substitute for critical and sustained thinking by humans, whose Stone Age brains need a little time to let their impulses subside, to slow the mind and let the thoughts flow."

After all, fast decisions aren’t always the best ones.

If you’ve ever made a snap decision at a restaurant, then you’ll know how frustrating food envy can be. You could be tucking into that mouth-wateringly tasty seafood platter, but you chose pasta… again. Why? Because you’ve acted on autopilot:

"When we have to make fast decisions, autopilot brain kicks in, and we rely on our learned behaviours, our reflexes, our cognitive biases, to help us perceive and respond quickly."

Bouskill continues:

"Oftentimes, when our society has major failures, they're not technological failures. They're failures that happen when we made decisions too quickly on autopilot. We didn't do the creative or critical thinking required to connect the dots or weed out false information or make sense of complexity. That kind of thinking can't be done fast. That's slow thinking."

Now, “slow thinking” about what to eat for dinner would be overkill - it’s not a life or death situation, after all - but it goes to show how humans make rash, detrimental decisions because of our ever-increasing need for speed.