Love this call out from an interview on NPR:
So, if you want people to endorse hierarchical thinking, put them under time pressure or just get them drunk.
They’re talking about research that when people enter low-thinking environments (such as when they’re drunk) they revert to mental models developed early in childhood: in this case favoring hierarchical relationships over more egalitarian ones. The zinger for me is that the researchers could get the same results from people who were put under time pressure.
So when volunteers are asked to divide resources in a game, for example, people given less time to think about it are more likely to divide the money unfairly and to endorse existing hierarchies.
This seems to have pretty dire implications if you want to be making good decisions you can AND you want to go fast.
I think this is one reason that meditation is kind of an end in itself. I’m not meditating to get new ideas, or to make a particular decision, I’m meditating in some sense simply to slow down for its own sake. Simply so that when I am making decisions I’m not reverting to immature mental models.
This reminds me of a wonderful yoga teacher in Michigan saying that the purpose of mediation isn’t to have no distracting thoughts, it’s to get used to coming back from them. Returning from distraction is the practice.
Want to slow down, “draw” a few of the examples here with the speed set to “slow”: SpirographN
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