High Cognitive Minds

A question on an online test pointed at what seems to be a simple distinction, whether you tend to pay more attention to details or to the big picture. I wasn't sure how to answer because both are important, depending on the context. But thinking it over, I realized that the big picture is the outcome of choosing which details to pay attention to.

My way of learning about what's going on in the world is to scan news headlines and first paragraphs. When a topic comes up in different contexts and from different perspectives, I get a feeling for what's going on without being burdened by too much detail. Since the details are often trivial and ephemeral, it's more practical to develop a sense of the patterns that are developing and then, if need be, fill in the details from one or two sources.

I thought about this in connection with the complaint I see so often, that people today are overwhelmed by too much information, and unable to sort out the important from the unimportant. This started me on something like a sorting process of my own. A question that came up in my mind was about the reasons for acquiring new information. For me, one reason is related to the difference between participation and observation. I participate less and less in online forums, becoming more of a lurker. I comment less frequently on blogs, even when the subject provokes me to think about something in depth.

To participate usefully in a discussion, you need details--names, dates, numbers, places, etc. But I don't bother with details unless they become important to me for one reason or another. My scanning is a form of pattern hunting, and the details aren't always significant. When they are significant, I either pay specific attention to them, or find that I've absorbed them through a kind of osmosis from the various contexts they're embedded in. But there aren't many discussion topics that are interesting enough for me to backtrack for the necessary details. Forums have their own patterns, which I learn from, but I save my attention to details for more substantive writing.

Scanning produces patterns, short-term patterns and long-term patterns: what's uppermost in the news at present, what people are paying most attention to, what they're saying about it, how attention grows and wanes, what's being said about social, political, or economic change. One result of seeing these patterns is understanding that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The details change, but most patterns change very little, if at all. Most people are so fixated on the details that they have no concept that there's a big picture they're missing. The result is that they approach big-picture issues from a narrow close-up view.

Most humans are tied to the here and now, to the details that make up their everyday lives. To see a larger picture, you have to have the capacity to see something more abstract than the concrete details. You have to be able to see and consider implications, connections, and interactions that aren't obvious enough to catch most people's random attention. You need the capacity to see not only the big picture, but what Stewart Brand called "the long now." Our world desperately needs both. It's a comparatively rare ability, and possibly the most important one for intellectually gifted individuals to cultivate.