Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Bestselling Author of Spark, A User’s Guide to the Brain, and Driven to Distraction

Like the Oracle at Delphi, Rebecca Costa in The Watchman’s Rattle is calling us to know ourselves and thereby giving us a chance to save us from ourselves.  She is a worthy watchman as she has spent numerous careers observing patterns in many fields and translating them into visions for others.  She is shaking the alarm to help us look once again to our own power.  We live in a time of the greatest possibility and tools ever, but we are in danger of becoming enslaved to the very cyber slaves that we have to serve us.

We live in a time of truthism, where whatever is said loud and often enough becomes true, where correlation becomes causal.  Media drives our thinking and speaking, even our images arise from what we have seen or heard, and the world is growing darker, as genuine contemplation erodes. News is NOT (there are hardly any real news reporters anywhere), and we have to carefully choose our blogs to get more than the latest gripping disaster or the latest celebrity expose. So today we know more about the latest sports figure or starlet’s failings than who the secretary of state is, or what is it she does. In medicine, we are at least told to go to evidence based practice, but this too is so driven by drug companies funding our research. So our medical students, doctors and our patients only think of treatment rather than prevention. The Watchman’s Rattle reports from the best thinkers of our day to help us start to deal with this addicting mind-eroding world that has diminished our resilience, our self-reliance, and even our awareness of who we are.  We are quite far from knowing ourselves.

We need to recognize that our culture has co-evolved at light speed compared to the glacial speed that our genes change, and that we are thrust in the middle of it. We are driven by an ancient categorical imperative that has become “get the most toys, get the securest nook, get the Shangri-La on earth”.  Today we go to the couch as a short-term trip to Tahiti; for the TV, computer and the trough of instant goodies all make it easy to amuse ourselves to death.  This despite the new directives from the happiness gurus who are telling us to live simply as possible, get connected as much as can and find missions that compel us that look beyond ourselves. They advise be in process, there is no real prize at the end of the rainbow, it is the journey.  We are best when we are moving, growing and taking up challenges.

She warns that we have reached a cognitive threshold or gridlock, so we need to remember that we are animals who need to move, not to sit, to play actively, not be the passive receptacles of media input that entertains us. Our passive stance once developed to help conserve as much fuel as possible and now when we are safe, secure, and have a reasonable supply of food, this inborn tendency is killing us.  This is the source of our multiple epidemics- obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many of our medical and psychiatric troubles that are mainly caused by our not recognizing and adapting to the new world order.  We need to move out of our gridlock and leave the belief that our culture cherishes, that relaxing and having the most stuff is the ultimate goal of our lives.   We need to recapture our knowledge of who we are- animals with tremendous bodies and brains that we need to use and challenge or we erode and fall into dis-ease.   We deny the facts and just think life will continue and we will have a pill or new device that will fix our self-inflicted ills as we further cede responsibility. In our very troubled schools we move from “no child left behind” or what I called “no child helped at all” to the “race to the top” – but we do this without looking at what we know and who we are.  We teach to raise tests scores when raising the “well child” would serve us all so much better. Both policies blindly loose the fact that the more physically fit child does better in school, not just the easier fix of Jamie Oliver with a garden in every suburban yard, but getting to a fitness and active Play based physical education program in every school, preschool thru college. The facts are in and they have been in--   fitness improves thinking, performance, learning, and memory.  Being obese and out of breath on a large scale leads to our kids being the Biggest Losers.  And they are.

Today’s government policies push local school boards to cripple or cut physical education programs and say nothing about what we know is effective in making our future citizens not only healthier but smarter, happier, more emotionally regulated, and more motivated.  We ignore the data and think that more seat time is the way to go.  It is gridlock in the worst way, only looking at the short term goal.  It is belief triumphing over the facts. Rebecca warns that when knowledge becomes too complex we rush to certainty of beliefs and the current belief in education is that more concentrated time sitting and drilling are needed at the expense of the arts, play and time spent pursuing wellness.

We need to be prepared for the future, to become the everyday athlete and using all our tools to ready us for what is next. Rebecca says let's all work in parallel mitigations.  This is especially true in raising our future generations to pursue wellness, it is not just starting an organic garden, nor just playing and exercising, nor just training our brains using computers, but developing non-virtual human connections that are so vital to us all. It is time that we stop worrying about health care policy and reassert that we are in deed responsible for our own health.