Consequences of Increments in Cognitive Structure for Attentional Automatization, the Experience of Boredom, and Engagement in Egocentric, Hyperdynamic, Interest-Generating Behaviors: A Developmental Psychophysiologic Approach

I am a developmental psychophysiologist (PhD, Stanford, 1971) employing a "developmental systems" ontologic approach to my clinical and research work. My ontology employs key assumptions from developmental psychophysiology, information and control theory, and general systems theory, in a unique conceptual synthesis proferring new perspectives of cognitive complexity, "life," evolution, "self," health, sleep, and stress. My approach illuminates heretofore unrecognized interrelations between a structure's developmental level of "cognitive structure" (i.e., the structure's "cognitive complexity") and the structure's preferred level of behavioral dynamicity and correlative receptivity to stimulation, change, and transformation. "Structures" can be "psychological/informational" and/or "physically" expressed. I work full-time as a sleep specialist at a free-standing pulmonary and sleep disorders center in South Texas (www.sleepdrs.com). As Associate Director of the Center, I am responsible for maintaining a state-of-the art, accredited clinical capability in sleep disorders medicine, and for developing the Center's research capability. In my spare time, I maintain an Internet-facilitated "Center for the Study of Boredom, Interest, and Entertainment" (CSBII), housed in a separate room of my residence in McAllen, Texas. From my dedicated home office and Internet web site (www.boredominterest.net), I consult and disseminate information on boredom and interest/entertainment to individuals using the Internet to seek information on the topics. My web site also serves as a nexus of communication among researchers/writers having boredom experience and behaviors as a principal area of research focus. I have published several works (three book chapters, many journal articles and abstracts, and a book) outlining my developmental systems conceptual approach to a broad range of behaviors and psychobiological phenomena. My first book, "The Psychobiology of Cancer: Automatization and Boredom in Health and Disease," New York, 1983, Praeger Publishers, described implications of my approach for new perspectives of the etiology and/or modulation of cancer and a broad range of health-related phenomena. I have recently completed writing a book manuscript entitled "Knowledge, Automatization, and Boredom: A Seminal Dynamic Modulating Behavioral Dynamicity, Cultural Change, and Our Enormous, Always-Growing Need for Entertainment, Community, and Spiritual Experience." At the upcoming ISSS annual conference, I hope to be permitted to give a paper describing my developmental systems conceptual approach and its implications for new perspectives of the etiology and modulation of a broad range of contemporary real-world phenomena and problems. The presentation will focus on the role of the development of cognitive structure/cognitive complexity and the associated experience of boredom/interest in the modulation of man's exploitation of the earth, its natural resources, and other individuals for dispelling of boredom experience, i.e., for the generation of interest, entertainment, and "relaxation." Implications for practical, real-world mitigation of destructive and exploitative behaviors will be discussed.