”Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?,” by Diane Ackerman
Milgram’s concept of stimulus overload is quite intriguing. As was cited by Schneider, Gruman, and Coutts (2012), stimulus overload is the idea that our society today is much too much for our hunter-gatherer nervous systems. We weren’t ancestrally prepared to deal with booming cities, overly crowded schools and the bombardment of the world at our swiftly moving thumb tips. So what did we do? Did we adapt and overcome? Of course we didn’t! We developed apps for that. We have cell phones, I pods, I pads, mp3 players, wireless headphones, and Google glass. There is no need to feel overloaded because we have found ways to take the world in at moderations that we (at times) can control. However, Diane Ackerman wrote to the New York Times proposing a very fair question. Are we today still facing stimulus overload or are we subjecting ourselves to stimulus poverty? If you have taken a psychology course, you may be familiar with concepts such as conditioning, and if you have taken any courses in anthropology, you may be familiar with concepts about evolution along with learned behavioral traits. Basically, we see, we learn, we pass it on. Do it often enough and it becomes second nature. So why did we as a species not adapt to the growth of stimuli in our surroundings? Was it growing faster than we could to evolve in order to handle it? Darwin could argue that technology has allowed for the survival of the weak. Perhaps the generations of watching our elders swoon in fascination over fast past technologies has led us to be the monkeys that saw and now do. I often catch my son happily sitting next to me, Mario game in hand while I myself am playing a game. But are we hurting ourselves by using stimulus overload as an excuse to continue living socially withdrawn? Is this what we are going to use for the answer to, why don’t we talk anymore? Maybe if we looked up at the world with our hands devoid of any devices and our ears free from plugs, we would find by the end of the day that the world isn’t all that overwhelming after all. We just might like it.
References
Ackerman, D. (2012, June 10). Are we living in sensory overload or sensory poverty?. New York Times. Retrieved June 27, 2014, from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/are-we-living-in-sensory-overload-or-sensory-poverty/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2005). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Tags: Applied social psychology, Community, community psychology, psych 424, stimulus overload, stimulus poverty, technology