ARE WE ALL LAZY ?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18453, 14 January 1922, Page 14

ARE WE ALL LAZY ?

Yes! replies the editor of The Medical Review of Reviews (New York). Not physically perhaps/ but almost always mentally. He quotes as typical of most of us the confession of a college professor, an energetic worker, who yen admitted that he was guilty of mental laziness. “I have to drive myself to mental , work,” he said. ‘‘l go out to the wood pile and really enjoy working it up into small size. Gardening is a pleasure to me. A hike across the country is a delight. My muscles seem to be' as ravenous for exercise as my stomach is for food ; but when it comes to real brain work, I have to drive myself. When I attempt to follow a definite'; trend of thought, my . mind starts off on x a tangent in the line of least resistance, and I am constantly under the necessity of forcing it back into profitable action.” The writer goes on: So much for the confession of a man whose mind was more than usually alert. Fiction, fun, entertainment, the movies, anything, in fact, to keep the mind active in an easy diverting way—-anything’ but real mental work. And this man’s confession might well be the confession of the human race. But perhaps we find that the most active minds have only occasional times of real hunger for acquisition. For the rest of the time during which work is "accomplished it is done as it was in the case of Professor D.—by means of rigorous self-discipline. There must tbc some motive: the ambition to a college course, perhaps to complete it with highest honours; the determination to succeed in some other line; or the stimulus of strong rivalry. Usually there is some compelling force outside the mere acquisition of knowledge that goads one on to his work.

So wc may freely admit that by nature man is mentally lazy, and that this mental inertia- is something that must be overcome in order to achieve success. The line of resistance leads to parties, to the movies, to social affairs, to this, that and the other, until we deceive ourselves into believing that we hrive no time for serious work. If we will be honest with ourselves we will admit that we have as much time as the person who is making'a success; but we do not want to overcome our mental laziness, preferring the ease, the “good time,” the “hail-fellcKv-well-met” — anything, in fact, to strenuous mental work; and our plea of “no time” is mere camouflage by which we are trying to deceive ourselves and others.

Mental efficiency is defined by the writer as the ability to meet new situations as they arise. It is—or should be— the characteristic which distinguishes man from the' animals. The fact is, man too often reacts by habit, just as an animal does. One does not attempt to drive an automobile in a crowded street until his control of the machine has become automatic. If he has not formed fixed habits he is. more likely than not, in an emergency, to do the wrong thing. He goes on:

We are all creatures of habit. We frequently meet certain situations, and we have habitual methods of meeting them. If we are thrown into a situation entirely strange to us, we are almost sure to do the wrong thing. Let a nerson who is unaccustomed to swimming fall into deep water. Although he may have read or heard that a few motions with his hand under the water will -keep him afloat, he wilK throw his hands out of the water, just the thing he should not do, and unless help comes he will drown. In about as sensible a way we meet any new situation. If we form an adjustment it is usually an inferior adjustment, by the method of trial-and-error, the same method that a rat or a cat or any other animal will use if placed in, a new situation. Such a thing as studying the matter and mentally working out the best method of meeting it is one of the rarest of phenomena. The men who are capable of, so using their minds to meet situations are our great inventors like Edison our wizards like Burbank; and yet even such men as these do much of their work by trihl-and-error.

There is probably hardly a task in our daily routine, no matter how often we have’performed it, that could not be done more quickly, more efficiently, and with less; wear and tear. Wo have stumbled into habits of doing things which, if motion pictures could be made of them and slowed down for study, we should see are clumsy and wasteful in, the extreme, and yet we flatter ourselves that we are reasoning animals. Reason is one of the rarest things with us. Our daily lives, as well as our minds, run in' ruts, which deepen &r. we grow older.

All this is in illustration of the .fact that it is easier for us to work by rote, by rule of thumb, by tnal-and-error, by the formation of habits which are only approximately economical, than it is for us to think and plan. In other words, we all of us are too.lazy to use our minds efficiently; and probably as regards the ordinary affairs of life, even our Edisons and -our Burbanks are open to the same criticism. Possibly the story related of Newton that he made a hole in the door to admit the cat and then beside it a smaller hole to admit the kittens is not far-fetched. Few of us, even of our wise ones, - us our brains efficiently. An, illustration of the fact that man ordinarily, does not use his reasoning powers is in the prevalence of superstitious ideas regarding bad luck or good luck.

Professor James has called attention to the fact that we all have unutilised and unsuspected qualities. It is only in some crisis that all our powers are called out; and at such a time the hormones (or whatever they are that are poured out to stimulate) urge one person on to super-, human activity while they paralyse another. *

The important fact for us to realise is that we are all high-pressure machines, but that we habituallv run at Tow pressure, and only rarely do we suspect the possibilities that are enfolded in our organism ready to be used. But we are lazy; we are content to live a life of partial success. We measure ourselves with those around us, excuse ourselves for not doing more, and gradually but surely get into a rut of semiinactivity, which* gives us, a far lower place in the scale of accomplishment than is within our reach.” *