Cognitive Patience: The Ability To Deal With The World Without Rushing

Have we lost our cognitive patience? Have we put aside this precious ability to understand and process our reality in a relaxed yet profound way? According to several neuroscientists, the answer is “yes”. In fact, this idea is more and more present, especially if we think about how we treat the information that comes to us from social media: quickly and without thinking.

The term  cognitive patience  was recently coined by Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist  and developmental brain psycholinguist at the University of California. In her book  Reader, come home,  she explains something that has happened to her for a long time.

Much of  today’s readers cannot read for an hour at a time without looking at their cell phones several times.  We have become impatient. And what’s more, we are losing some of our ability to concentrate. Stephen King recently spoke about a rapidly growing phenomenon: audiobooks.

This easy and accessible format allows us to do other tasks while a pleasant voice reads us a novel. The effort is therefore minimal. Cognitive patience, in this case, does not refer to our ability to expect or delay gratification. It consists in calmly processing an information, a reality, an event.

It is this skill that makes it possible to give meaning to things after having deepened them. A capacity for control that helps us to regulate interference, to focus on a goal by taking our time, staying away from all pressure and using that muscle we often overlook: attention.

Let’s dig deeper into this point.

Cognitive patience on the verge of extinction

One phenomenon that is seen more and more is  skimming. It refers to this strategy based on speed reading, which consists of paying attention only to the beginning and the end of a text or information. We only keep the most superficial parts of what we have in front of us, whether it is a book, an article, an instruction sheet.

The opposite of  skimming  is  scanning,  that is, the meticulous analysis of every part of a piece of information. These Anglo-Saxon terms very accurately reflect a practice that we find among a large part of the population. One who has lost (or is losing) an essential skill: cognitive patience.

If we look at the world at full speed, we cannot understand its secrets. If we rush to get quick information from any point in our environment, we may only get a half-truth. What is more,  if we do not use our analytical, critical and reflective capacity, we end up believing lies  or blurting out the most important nuances of our reality.

So we need to understand that losing our cognitive patience makes us much more vulnerable to demagoguery. In a world obsessed with speed and orchestrated by this information that is transmitted in seconds, people have a very clear obligation: to be careful, demanding and meticulous.

Patience is a concentrated force and gives us wisdom

We live in a society that does not place much importance on patience. People with power, for example, don’t wait. They never stand in line. Since we were children, we have been instilled with this classic idea: if we want something, we have to go and get it. It is true that determination is important. But one thing is even more so: to learn to be patient, to understand that success and wisdom take time.

• To ignite and use our cognitive patience, we must first understand that being patient does not give us power over circumstances. It allows us to have more control over ourselves in the midst of any circumstance.
• Cognitive patience is also about training this attitude that allows us to observe the world through children’s eyes. We have to recover the interest, the curiosity, the instinctive appreciation of details and nuances.
• Our gaze must also be extremely demanding. The demon of haste should not be our guide. We have to want to know, to get our own truth about what we see, feel or read.
• It is interesting to know that cognitive patience is not a passive skill. Quite the contrary. No process requires so much activity, drive and open-mindedness.

• Studies like the one conducted at the University of Psychology of Pasadena tell us that  using this tool on a daily basis allows us to decrease the risk of depression  and other types of disorders.

This dimension is the wisest answer we can give to the daily challenges of life. Only by being patient and learning to deal with the world without haste can we appreciate its magical details, grandeur and truths.

Let us train our attention, let us focus on the pleasure of calm. And remember that patience is, ultimately, a concentrated force directed towards a goal.

Our thoughts

Most of us are aware that it is very important to develop patience in order to live smarter.