Luis Gutiérrez Rojas (Granada, 1977), MD, is a psychiatrist, speaker, and member of  HumanSpeakersES . He graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Navarra (2001), specializing in Psychiatry. He received a scholarship from the Spanish Society of Psychiatry to complete his final year of residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He earned his doctorate on quality of life in bipolar disorder, receiving the Extraordinary Doctoral Award. He defended his dissertation at the University of Granada in 2008. Currently, he participates in conferences and lectures and is also part of the Psychiatry and Neuroscience research group affiliated with the Biomedical Research Center at the University of Granada. In  “The Opinion of…”  he speaks about silence and how necessary it is to generate and create imagination, thought, and foster reflection.

Anyone who works in teaching today knows that they face all kinds of difficulties in getting their students  motivated and focused  in order to get the best possible performance out of them.

The dangers that hinder this task are numerous, and many of them are well-known and a cause for concern among educators and those responsible for educational tasks, but others are more subtle and difficult to objectify, and it is precisely one of these that I want to talk to you about.

One of the defining characteristics of today’s society is  the lack of silence . There is so much noise, so much information, so many images that it becomes very difficult for students to acquire new knowledge. Attention deficit (difficulties concentrating) is a  growing phenomenon  that affects more and more children.

As a clinical psychiatrist, I have treated school-aged children (and adults as well) with this disorder, and they have improved with the various therapies available to us. Therefore, I am not one of those who believe the illness doesn’t exist or is fabricated. However, it can be stated unequivocally that  not all attention deficit is due to a clinical disorder,  just as not every patient with a fever has an infection.

Our society hinders concentration because it shuns the conditions that facilitate it. A good teaching plan (a good strategy) focused on improving our students’ cognition should concentrate on reducing activity, decreasing noise, creating silence, fostering reflection, and  allowing people to think .

In my lectures, I often joke that the best psychiatrist is the silent psychiatrist, because that’s the one who listens to the patient, allowing them to understand, to become aware of, what is happening to them and act accordingly. The art of medicine doesn’t consist of telling the patient what to do, but rather in helping them know what they need to do. Similarly, a good education should focus on asking students  the right questions so they can find the right answers .

Words, words, words, as Shakespeare said, there are too many, so many that we no longer know where the truth lies. Our children are thrust into such an intense social life, such necessary extracurricular activities, and such a summer full of trips that they are robbed of the possibility of exercising an essential right:  the right to be bored , to do nothing in particular, to listen to the silence.

That doesn’t mean they should lie on a sofa and gorge themselves on screens, but rather  generate a creative silence that leads them to exercise their imagination , play in the street, act out a character or invent a new game.

Paradoxically, when someone has everything done for them, when everything is prefabricated, the student gets stuck. That’s why it’s necessary to allow them (according to their ability and age) to  make decisions , learn to make mistakes, and form their own opinions.

Only in silence (and in healthy solitude) can one memorize, read calmly, and understand what one is experiencing. Only from silence can one discover transcendence.

That’s why our society, increasingly fast-paced, more accelerated, more multitasking,  is becoming poorer, more materialistic, and more hedonistic . We all know we’re on the wrong track, but to realize this, we should be able to stop and think, even if only for a moment.