Understanding Cognition and How it Can be Used to Benefit All (Ch 1 Blog)

Cognition is an amazing thing. We all use it every single day, most of the time without even realizing the complexity of what we are doing. Simple acts require using our cognitive abilities in several ways: simply getting a glass of water requires us to perceive, pay attention, remember, distinguish between items, and make decisions, all of which are components of cognition.

So what exactly is cognition? In a nutshell, it is what our mind does, which means to understand cognition, we must understand what the mind is.

The concept of "the mind" is one that is challenging to define. One option, as provided by Cognitive Psychology by E. Bruce Goldstein, is "the mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotion, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning. It is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals."

These goals referred to include individual goals, but can also extend to include goals for our societies and for our world.

A Ted Talk by Clay Shirky, brings up the concept of cognitive surplus. Cognitive surplus is the concept that we all have excess cognitive energy. We use it when we scroll through Facebook, watch Youtube videos or television, look at lolcats pictures, or participate in other pass time activities. It is the ability to perform cognitive functions past what it is that we need to do each day.

Human beings want to contribute to society. It is often an intrinsic need. We not only use this surplus to consume information, we often use it to satisfy our need to contribute. There are two ways that we do this. One way is for a communal value. Things such as lolcats or Facebook tend to contribute in this way, where the focus is on something created by participants for each other. Another way, discussed in the video, is for a civic value, where something is created by participants that can service society as a whole. Our modern tools, such as media and technology, are effective modes to contribute in this way.

In 2008, two programmers created the website Ushahidi in response to the amount of information pouring in about the violence in Kenya. It compiled the overwhelming amount of information contributed by many people, which was too much for any one person to keep up with, into a resource that could be used, understood, and taken in by anyone.

If you added up the cognitive surplus of the global population throughout the year, it equates to 1 trillion hours...

Let me repeat that.

THERE ARE 1 TRILLION HOURS OF EXCESS COGNITIVE ENERGY A YEAR!!!

If we even took half of that, if each person took half of their cognitive energy each day, to contribute to society in a civic manner, which is made so much easier by many people's access to technology, what type of world would we be living in? How well informed would we be. If we each took the five minutes a day to read through and share something of civic value posted on Facebook, or on a blog, instead of just scrolling past to "like" the picture of the cat that wants the cheeseburger, we could each be having a part in changing the world.

So what will it be? It's up to you.