Amerika

A database is a program optimized for storing and retrieving data quickly and efficiently. It can handle data of uneven sizes, too, and is faster than other options for storage. The modern world runs on these, with trillions of connections made per second worldwide.

When you dial a phone, it is the database at the provider that recognizes you and looks up how to complete the call. When you buy groceries, the scanner hits a database of prices and then, the credit card reader connects to remote databases to look up and update your account.

While databases are specialized and refined in their task, they have weaknesses: the more data they have in them, the slower they move. Big services handle this by having databases to manage their databases, the first finding where to look and the second looking it up.

But imagine that you have a single database, like on your own machine or a smaller online service. It works really well when it has relatively small amounts of data, but the more you add, the slower it gets, until at some point you notice performance slow down.

What about your original database? Your brain handles the functions of intelligence, taking in sense-data from the world, analyzing it, and developing potential solutions. Each of these relies heavily on the ability to recall stored data.

This means that everything you see, hear, read, or think is being recorded. Much of it is discarded, but most things that are not strict repetition (your ten thousandth visit to a grocery store) leave an impression and are remembered.

One reason modern life seems overwhelming is that we fill our heads with stuff that is not relevant. In a healthy society — mono-ethnic, monarchist, open markets, culture-rule, drowning idiots in swamps — you have little to recall, so most of what you notice is nature and people.

When we enter into modern times, which seems to be a tradeoff for enough decline to allow the development of economic and technological systems, our heads are filled with encounters of random people, television, politics, and intense visual clutter.

All of this goes into the database, and over time it slows down. At first it is nearly imperceptible, but as time goes on, the slowdown accumulates, sort of like calcification or encrustation. Eventually the database is too slow to use.

Very few humans think about what they put in their brains, not merely in a political sense, but in terms of how much data of dubious value they are loading into their minds. People are currently talking about social media, but television and socializing really are no different.

We spam ourselves with stuff that matters to others for them to justify their individualism and pretend they have a sense of purpose, saturate our minds in cries for social attention, and smother any thought we have with jobs and shopping. Then we wonder why we cannot think.

Tags: mental map, social attention