This is the best op-ed from a class Michael Shermer and I teach at Claremont Graduate University called "Brain, Evolution, and Society". It was written by
Andrew Shaindlin, your guest blogger.
Despite what you've been hearing, America has a surplus.
Not the financial kind. The mental kind. We have an untapped pool of brainpower waiting to be applied to solving problems and absorbing information. And it's time we did something about it.
In a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference in April 2008, Clay Shirky (adjunct professor at New York University) put a name to the excess intellectual capacity currently being used to analyze what happened on Desperate Housewives last week. He called it America's "cognitive surplus."
Cumulatively, said Shirky, Americans spend an astounding 100 million hours watching just the ads on television - every weekend. Add to that the time spent updating Facebook pages and playing video games and pretty soon you're talking real time. Shirky's observation hardly scratches the surface: "This is a pretty big surplus," he says. Gee, do you think?
Why is this a surplus? Because, by definition, those hundreds of millions of hours aren't being used productively. Sure, we all need some "down time," and it's nice to take a break from the grind of work. But just think about the potential for creating a different kind of surplus - a financial one - if just a fraction of the time wasted on Wii boxing or LOLcats was spent, instead, in pursuit of a way to hone our mental acuity.
The Onion, a national humor publication, carried a mock headline in its July 14, 2004 issue, illustrating perfectly the time wasted on commercial airline flights. "Copies of Da Vinci Code Litter Crash Site," the headline declared. A doctored photo accompanying the story showed a rescue worker surveying the tangled wreckage of a downed airliner, surrounded by dozens of copies of Dan Brown's intellectually lightweight best-selling thriller.
Look around at the frequent fliers on your own flights from Seattle to San Diego and from L. A. to London and you'll see it plain as day.
Locked in a seated position for hours at a time, Americans will choose the cognitive equivalent of a tranquilizer to avoid thinking about anything more difficult than this week's Word Search. And of course, that's our privilege. We love our freedom, and if we define "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as three hours of Large Print Easy Sudoku, that's our inalienable right.
But maybe it's time to offer a way for the more ambitious to engage in something more rewarding. The result might just be a greater long-term return on the time Americans spend with "nothing to do."
So here's my modest proposal.
Want to curl up with The Bourne Supremacy in paperback, or camp out in seat 24B engrossed in Kindergarten Cop on your iPod Touch? Nobody is going to stop you. But in the next seat, I'll crack open the collected short stories of Vladimir Nabokov, or dive into a book explaining the importance of evolutionary theory. Or maybe I'll watch a documentary, or a performance of Agamemnon.
"But you can do that now," you say. "What's the big deal? Go ahead with your egghead pursuits and leave me in silence to finish my Wolverine collector's edition!" And I'll be happy to, secure in the knowledge that, upon completing a test covering the material I read or viewed during the same flight, I'll be rebated up to 30% of the price of my plane ticket - depending on how well I've absorbed the material.
That's right: I propose a national rebate on self-improvement, a return on an American investment in perspicacity. For every unit of self-directed learning or productive mental work, conscientious travelers will earn credits toward the cost of their travel.
There's no obligation. Freedom of choice is preserved. If you don't want to help absorb some of the nation's cognitive surplus, you certainly do not have to. You can still pay full retail for airplane tickets and watch How Stella Got Her Groove Back on your personal video player.
Nationally, the result of even a few passengers passing up Tom Clancy for Charles Dickens will be a more learned and liberally educated public, more prepared for intellectual understanding, for knowledge work, and better able to solve tomorrow's problems. Folks who slept through American Lit, who snoozed through Economics, or bailed on Business 101 will have a chance to regain a spot at the head of the class.
We'll also get a more engaged, insightful and educated person to talk to during our next long flight - as well as a more productive, analytical and effective corps of American problem solvers in the long run.
So put down the Sudoku, save a few dollars, and read along with me: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."
