Marion's Blog

Evolution of Sense Overload

When we were cave men and women – we used simple grunts to indicate what we wanted, with the occasional picture on the wall for better understanding of what we were grunting about. Which probably drew a few more grunts as in “wow, great picture dude!” All our senses and emotions were geared towards basic survival – faced with a large animal with teeth substantially larger then the stick you were carrying – fear kicked in, you legs started turning hopefully fast enough to carry you a long way away and into the safety of your cave. No mental power was required, in fact, as Izzy Justice pointed out in his session on Emotional Intelligence this week in Chicago – if your ancestor had stopped to think about whether it would be better to run left or maybe right, or no, let’s climb up a tree….then you would not have been sitting here now reading this blog. So our basic emotions are tied directly to our nervous system, with a sprinkling of hormones to regulate. As we evolved into talking creatures, who communicate with words instead of grunts, diagrams instead of cave wall art, our basic emotional responses have not change much – we are still very much tied to react instinctively to situations. This happens frequently in the workplace of course – somebody trips you up and you get angry – I now know that that negative emotion takes four hours to leave your system. Not so crazy when you think that life in the cave world was a dangerous place and you might have been followed by the beast – so you needed to be alert for quite a while, not just an instant. Similarly – not that crazy either that happy, positive emotions only last half an hour – you could not walk around wearing pink glasses for half a day, sniffing pretty flowers amidst things that looked upon you as brunch or dinner – you had to be hyper alert and happy endorphins might just stop you from living to see the next day.

But what has changed is the number of events that trigger these emotions. Whereas these triggers were as basic as our responses, related to food, safety, reproduction etc, there are now tons of things that hit our nervous system on a minute by minute basis via any one of our senses. We all understand the term Information Overload – it’s the stream of information your brain is required to digest on a daily basis: news, TV, information at work and now internet and other new media all battling for your attention. It is no wonder that people are more and more comfortable with snippets of information instead of long articles, learn better when they are IN the situation then in a classroom. But we have not yet looked at what is happening to our Senses during all this. The fact that we are constantly surrounded by for instance sights and noise – that you cannot find a place anymore where no-one is talking (mostly loudly) into a phone, or a radio or tv is blearing out news – I am certain this is now overloading our Senses. Those very senses, that we needed originally to trigger responses necessary for our survival, are now being triggered by far lesser things that are mere annoyances. Isn’t it time we went back and found some quiet time – so that our senses can calm down and regroup and refocus. And it is clear that a simple half an hour meditation, although helpful is not enough. I know entrepreneurs are mostly do’ers – not the types to sit still and just BE, but I also know that we could be so much better at DO’ing – if we allowed ourselves from time to time to get to our senses  - literally.