Speeeeeeding

Few weeks back I came across an interesting awareness while attending an orientation session at my kid's playschool (first of it's kind for me). I had experienced the given effect before, but never thought about the cause. In the session, the parents were being advised not to expose their kids to too much of screen media like mobile devices, TV, video games etc. While type of screen media content (e.g violence), screen-time (how long kids are exposed), type of device etc. can cause detrimental effects to kid's physical and mental growth, the speed of the audio-visual representation is equally critical.

Due to this 'speed' factor kids may exhibit impulsive behavior and find it really difficult to be attentive. High speed content may impact the brain in such a way that they may not be able to adjust to standard pace of classroom teaching. They may even find 'human' teacher speaking too boring. Their brain is habituated to faster content & representation and finds relatively slower contents very difficult to accept.

True indeed! Many times I have experienced that phenomena myself. I have been a fan of Fifa (the leading edition of virtual football games) since my college days. Even today I notice that I find it hard to concentrate after an hour session of the game. During my college time I exercised a self-made solution to tackle this: I used to navigate slowly - from video games to reading magazines and then to serious study. Never been able to dive into study after a game session immediately.

I have also experienced the same with music. Fast music hardly register in our mind. We dance to it, party with it - but it would be surely exceptional if we carry the song with us. Of-course lyric matters, music matters. But probably slower music registers faster and get us in the mode!

Today I experience the same in many other spheres of life. While our life has become faster than ever, I wonder how little we care to think, to introspect and to imagine. No wonder I observe so much insistence on to have planned dedicated time for talking to yourself at peace (i.e. self introspection). Be it social posts, recipes from successful personalities, or professional training sessions - all agree to this. This is why every organization needs so much of communications around innovation, with encouragement for thinking out-of-the-box and so on!

Most of the times our individual goals are derived through templates (hence, not personalized) and conflicting in nature. One is expected to write whitepapers, contribute in multiple forums, achieve couple of certifications per cycle, demonstrate innovation in day to day work, helping or mentoring other individuals, setting goals for respective team members on top of 'critically' weighted timely, zero defect delivery, higher customer satisfaction, achieving internal stakeholders alignment and so on. Not everybody is a superman, so speeding is the only way to 'manage'.

Through different patterns of modern and successful life-style, like many other natural things - we have sacrificed our imagination, thinking hat to speed of life. We are in a competitive world and we have to achieve a lot more in less time (simply, productivity matters). But whats the point if we can't bloom our strength to its limit. Its a criminal when an idea strikes our mind and we can't see it through because we have immediate higher priority activities planned. And, during the 'planned' introspection session next morning, we failed to reach that state of the 'idea'! Unfortunately 'innovation' is not success proof and does not have Standard Operating Procedure!