My Brother is Smarter than Me
I am part of a new millennium family. We have half, step, and full-blooded siblings. We are the children of divorce and remarriage. We are one of the faces of the increasingly diverse American family.
As I mentioned recently, according to renowned futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, one of the fastest changing institutions in America is the American family. Fundamental institutions like education, business and family and the speed at which they change and adapt to the larger system are critical to the complex systemic shifts occurring in our world.
However, there was something crucial missing from the Toffler’s list; it’s the thing that drives all of the fundamental changes in our world and our environment – the structure of our own awareness.
Kids today move faster, process more information and regularly compete in domains far beyond the capacity of older generations. As an adult that grew up dominating most people in one video game after another I can attest to this. My youngest brother recently came to live with me. Today I put a large whiteboard on an easel in my kitchen recording the various wins and losses in our new family pass time, Stratego. Why did I do that? To showcase the last bastion of my ability to dominate in family games.
In one video game after another I find myself moving slower than my younger brothers. The reason? They have been reared on fast-paced, decision-based games that force them to be endlessly more aware of more things, more quickly than any activity in human history.
As Steven Johnson writes in his book, Everything Bad is Good for you:
…far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions…games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. …the primary activity (inside the gamer’s mind) turns out to be: making decisions, some of them snap judgments, some long-term strategies.
As Collin was learning the rules of Stratego he asked me what the bomb’s effective area (blast radius) was. It was a mind that thinks in cubes and tesseracts trying to understand the rules of a square game. Only moments later he was checking out some of the behavioral software I’m developing and, unbeknownst to him, giving me ideas for how to improve it by making it more complex, more engaging and more personal.
Split second, parallel processing, endless decision-making awareness like Collin’s is already shaping reality all around us. If you don’t want to be left behind, pay attention to how this generation filters the world, cause that’s where everything is going.
