Quite a few people have written about the need for solitude and deep thought in modern society. Cal Newport writes frequently on the topic. Stoicism is making it’s way back through whack jobs like Tim Ferris and less absurd people like Ryan Holiday.
My current read is Farsighted, by Steven Johnson. He focuses throughout the book on the value of putting proven processes and models into practice when trying to make better long term decisions. One of the revelations that is most counter-intuitive, and yet relevant, to modern life is the idea that our brains are actually more active during “rest” than when we’re actively trying to use them.
(more…)In other words, when we are left to our own mental devices, the mind drifts into a state where it swirls together memories and projections, mulls problems, and concocts strategies for the future…There is a simpler — and less revelatory — way of describing these discoveries: human beings daydream. We didn’t need an fMRI scanner to find this out about ourselves. What the technology did reveal was just how much energy daydreaming required. What feels like the mind drifting off into reverie is actually, on the level of neural activity, a full workout. And the brain regions involved in the workout happen to be the ones that are uniquely human.
Steven Johnson, Farsighted, pp. 79-80