Jason Silva during his public talk at Qatar National Library.
TV personality, film-maker, and futurist Jason Silva has urged young people to embrace “awe”, as his appearance at Qatar Foundation’s Education City Speaker Series saw him tackle themes ranging from education and technology to the human condition.
The host of National Geographic’s Emmy-nominated science reality series Brain Games spoke about the need to constantly re-imagine and reinvent how we live our lives in an era of “real-time change and time-lapse technology” during his public talk at Qatar National Library, co-hosted by global education think-tank WISE’s Doha Learning Days experiential learning festival.
“The right attitude in an age of exponential, rapid change is to play the infinite game – not one where we have short-term wins and losses, but one where we keep the game going, keep innovation going, and keep reinvention going,” said Silva.
The Education City Speaker Series sees Qatar Foundation brings together experts in a range of fields to share their experiences, ideas, and perspectives with the community of Qatar, and gives people a chance to interact with and quiz its guests. Silva – also known for his YouTube series Shots of Awe – follows in the footsteps of speakers from the fields of health, innovation, entrepreneurship, sport, and media, as well as senior figures from the United Nations. “One of the entry points I use to educate myself is awe and wonder,” he said during his talk. “In the face of rapid change, it’s very easy for the brain to get agitated, because with change comes uncertainty. But exponential change doesn’t just mean exponential uncertainty – it means exponential opportunity.
“To see this, you need to surrender to awe – allow it to stretch your model of the world and obliterate your sense of ‘been there and seen that’, of jadedness and fear. These moments of awe and wonder leave you with an afterglow that has a host of cognitive benefits, such as increased wellbeing and compassion. They take you out of autopilot and remind yourself that the territory of the world is much more vast than your own map.”
Silva described technology and innovation as a way of “turning the human mind inside out”, saying: “They are an extension of creativity and our mind, but that also raises a lot of challenges about how we steer these massive extensions of mind and in which direction we push them forward.
