our cognitive heat sinks

This is a fantastic video about how society deals with change by creating cognitive "heat sinks", which I'd never really thought of in those terms before, but makes perfect sense.

Clay Shirky goes over how we reach periods of societal change, and lose ourselves in mindless excess of things like alcohol, or sitcoms, and then start to tap that stored wealth of cognition and slowly bring ourselves to the next societal level.

I highly recommend checking it out, it really helped me solidify my thinking about how we create "relief valves" in our minds where we passively consume in order to spin unused brain cycles, it's not just sitcoms, it's professional sports, it's religion... we've got these heat sinks built up all around us, just waiting to be tapped. Otherwise, we would completely combust as a society.

The trick is to recognize your own heat sinks, and start to tap them to do something, instead of nothing.

His bit about someone asking him "Where do they find the time?" about Wikipedia really hit home for me, I've always been a firm believer that we have huge, HUGE amounts of free time that we fritter away. It confuses me when people ask me where I find time to play games to review on Noobtoob every week, and take Japanese classes, and do any number of other things - what's interesting is I still waste probably 40 hours a week on cognative heat sinks. Maybe more. I certainly don't feel like I'm making the most of my time.

We have to give ourselves permission to have these escape valves, of course, you can't be creating and contributing all the time, but whenever I force myself to take a couple percent of my spare brain cycles and actually DO something, I always feel better for it. And I think the direction we're going is really exciting, a whole new generation of kids are coming up who don't think of entertainment as a passive medium. I just need to learn to think like them and ditch my baggage.