Cognitive Impatience

This era is a digital era, and that is a reality that is difficult to escape. For those born already in the bosom of new technologies, living in a world full of technological gadgets is the natural order of things; For those born before such an outbreak, reality almost suddenly became a sea of ​​data and connectivity. However, many natives of this digital age present, as it is being verified, a marked cognitive impatience.

And it is that when the way of relating to others, with the surrounding world, and even the way of learning in the classroom and enjoying leisure resources involve the use of digital devices, the brain – with its enormous adaptive potential – becomes reorganizes to be as efficient as possible in this fast and overloaded external environment.

The end result of continued exposure to these digital environments, full of information, interconnectivity and simultaneity, can produce changes in people’s cognitive dynamics leading to cognitive impatience. This is characterized by a marked decrease in the ability to stay focused, on a single task, over a long period of time.

What’s wrong with cognitive impatience?

It was the university literature professor Mark Edmunson who coined the term cognitive impatience to refer to this phenomenon. In fact, when Edmunson observed a drastic drop in the number of students enrolled in classical literature courses, he quickly deduced that not too many young people today are able to concentrate on reading dense and long texts that exceed the length and length. complexity of typical Internet information.

The online environment , mobile applications, the media, social networks … All this bombards us with fast information, overloaded with visual and auditory stimuli, lacking conceptual depth and leads us to experience the need to abandon the task in progress to move on to another that is presented to us as more interesting or attractive than the previous one.

In this way, it is relatively easy to get used to the fact that, in order to receive our attention, a certain piece of information or information must powerfully call us to its strong salience features and the degree of attractiveness with which it is displayed.

Some of the damages that can be associated with this contemporary phenomenon are the following:

• Without sufficient attention our capacity for free thought and autonomous decision making can diminish.
• Tranquility is necessary for concentration and reflection; while the constant interruption of silence and calm that new technologies exert on us is incompatible with this tranquility.
• Being a victim of cognitive impatience, it is more difficult to understand complex ideas.
• The retention of information in memory can also be affected if this type of impatience does not allow the necessary exercise of attention as a previous step to memorization.

conclusion

Suffering the erosion of the ability to attend in a focused and sustained way and trust in the degree of emotionality that information awakens in us to attend to it or not, can make us servants of our emotions for the capture or ignorance of the information of the world that around us.

This phenomenon of cognitive impatience, which for some authors is representing a true crusade for human cognition, should perhaps arouse enough concern to explain to our children and grandchildren that it is time to stop looking at the screen of their mobile phones and pick up that block of bound pages we know as a book.