Mass Hysteria!!!

Mass Hysteria

Never have we lived in such a time as now. Information has never been as accessible or as easily produced and spread. It is everywhere and people are digesting it and becoming increasingly hungry for more.

What is also true is that individuals like never before have become vessels of information, not only digesting it but creating and opinionating for all to see. Facebook and Twitter have become the norm and people are increasingly sharing their thoughts as they have them. This sharing is on a massive scale and allows not only celebrities and the known to offer their wisdom but the everyday person wanting to be heard and connect.

With individuals wanting and accessing more information, and information being produced in unimaginable quantities, it would be fair to assume that knowledge has increased and individual power with it. With the click of a button, the Internet allows individuals to access pretty much anything that a search engine hits. If someone wants to know Elvis Presleys birthday they can have that information in seconds. The same person can then share with a worldwide audience their thoughts on The King and receive replays from others over the other side of the globe. If the same person has a question regarding a recent numbness in their eyelid they can post it and get an array of answers from anyone who wants to impart their thoughts. These people are unseen but their thoughts and opinions appear with the click of a mouse.

Information has drastically changed. Previous, information used to be much harder to create, spread and access. It was stuff in books, museums and scholars. One had to be motivated to produce it and even more motivated to find it. With information becoming easy, we have seen an exponential increase. With an increase in information one would assume there would be an increase in knowledge. With an increase in knowledge then one would assume an increase in power. With individuals having access to this information and also the new found ability to create and share it we could also assume an increase in individual power and autonomy. But is this the case? Has this change to the amount and accessibility of information given people more power or in-fact disempowered them. Has personal knowledge increased or has this new world created a vacuum of knowledge. More so, is most information now malevolent, a black hole that can engulf individuals who then pass it on to the next. Is most information actually propaganda with the effects quietly bubbling, sending us closer and closer to mass hysteria.

Humans gathering information however is not a new phenomenon. As soon as we are born we begin taking everything in. The way we do this is through our five senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. We also have a sixth sense. Whilst the other five are universal in that we all do them and experience them in much the same way, the sixth sense is slightly different for every person born. Many people share similar aspects depending on a variety of factors but this sense is still unique to every individual. More so, we have become more dependant on this sense than any of the others as time has gone by. This sense is The Mind.

This book is a look at how our senses shape our world and how information and our thirst for it has uncovered the forgotten sense the mind. This book will outline how the mind controls all the other senses and the influence it has on our experience of the world. As our nose provides us with information on our environment our minds seek out information in much the same way. But whilst vanilla smells sweet and mellow to all noses, information is not sensed and experienced the same to all minds. Minds take things differently.

So within this vessel of information we will examine the importance our each sense and how the forgotten sense the mind controls all the others. The mind being the meta sense, hungers for information. I will outline how the mind has become an insatiable sense. Not only does the mind grow on its own, I will outline how the world around us shapes it. The mind is biologically incredibly intelligent and its potential is infinite. The incredible capability of the mind will be outlined and explored. There is however an other side to this story and that is that the mind is only as good as the information that goes into it. With the Information Age the mind has become even more the sense people see the world through. Television, radio, the Internet are only the beginning of the minds smorgasbord of bites. As information becomes more accessible and more easily exposed one would think our minds would be more knowledgable and efficacious. This however is not the case and as you will see information and the mind our now a super sense combining to send us and our senses and us into Mass Hysteria.