ABSTRACT
In his brilliant if disturbing works Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans Simon Head traces and dissects the disseminative influence of "computer business systems" (CBSs) on workers in almost all areas of the "managed" world: manufacturing, the service industry, the financial sector and elsewhere. The mentality generated by CBSs promises to the population rapid, ready-made, pre-existent solutions. In many analysands, analysts are observing a shift away from the merit of the unknowable productiveness of unconscious thinking towards the value of knowable remedies that can be put into effect immediately. This type of operational thinking seeks cognitive analogues to the ingestion of medication that will be immediately effective. A person who is drawn to seeing rather than thinking is a sightophile. One feature of sightophilia is refractive thinking. Refractive thinking selects a minor feature of a communication and highlights it, sending the core communication to oblivion. It therefore eliminates meaning.
