I like to watch YouTube vids while working out on my exercise bike. Since YouTube’s algorithms are getting as good at suggesting vids for me as Amazon does with books, usually I graze its recommendations page before jumping on my bike. That’s how I discovered the “Data, Storytelling and Narratives” conversation between John Kellden and David Amerland.

At 5:43, David is talking about the connectivity factor as amplification factor. Doing so, he is brilliantly describing also one of the key insights that happens to drive my research on shared mindfulness. What is obvious is that the more connected a person, a thought, a video is, the broader its reach. What is less obvious is the transpersonal dimension of the  amplification factor.

In the very same act of one’s ideas reaching a wider audience, something else is happening, too, at the same time.Through the billions blogs, vids, tweets, likes, and comments that we post every minute, the neurons are forming in the nervous system of our global meta-being. These early-stage neurons are very crude and they will probably not get much smarter before the generalizations of semantic video, semantic search, and the radically disruptive social practices that will be associated with them.

What does all that have to do with shared mindfulness? A lot. First, it provides an analogy and a narrative to talk about the transpersonal dimension of transcending solo  mindfulness, as a need grounded in our tech-enabled, emerging planetary reality. A key feature of that reality is the “innervation” of the social hypercortex, which Teilhard de Chardin talked about half a century ago. More about that, another time, once I finished a new blog about the subject.

The  other way, in which shared mindfulness and increased connectivity relate to each other is this: The first can turn the second into a compelling opportunity to wise up our communities, organizations, and social institutions. That takes us closer to the Holy Grail of CI research: how to boost of collective wisdom at increasing scale? When we’ll have figured that out, then the “radically disruptive social practices” will kick in.

Thank you John and David for triggering this note.

p.s. A sequel to this note is here: An experiment to combine electronic and mindfulness amplification processes