Is IT making our brain lazy…

Ranjita Biswas

The recent neo-noir science fiction film Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the original cult film made 30 years ago, earned accolades for technological excellence and plot of a futuristic society. But it’s scary too. It makes us wonder: Are we going to be ‘Replicants’ someday — bioengineered human beings — when the world, as we know it has perished by our own hands and we live elsewhere in the galaxy, enslaved by technology? Are we going to be real-life ‘un-real’ characters slaves to a computer-generated technology?

Indeed, contemplations like these are not so outlandish in a world where with gene-engineering, scientists predict that human-like robots could even ‘think’ one day.

The world today is much more dependent on computer-generated information. This dependence is growing. The spellchecker has taken care of learning spellings. The calculator is there to do the calculations while the internet is there for you to search for any information under the sun. But is all this causing our brain to become lazy since reaching out to a tool to click on the smartphone or the laptop offers an easy solution?

These tools were apparently invented to make life simpler but like the proverbial whale gobbling up small fish, these are getting overwhelmingly pervasive in everyday life and influencing our thought-process. According to Kolkata-based psychological and legal counsellor, Swati Chatterjee, it is a fact that the thought process is deteriorating. “Many internet addicts are living in isolation. Communication with real life is getting limited. Due to this, power of observation and analytical process is getting a short shrift.” 

“Mostly people consider information from search-engines sacrosanct,” she says. As an example, she points out, “My husband is a doctor. But some patients come with all the information regarding a disease after ‘googling’ information on it on the internet and want to re-establish it with him.”

Social scientist Madhulika Mitra, agrees, “We can access the whole world sitting on a chair. We are even buying our daily needs online. While this has its positives, over dependence on technology is making us lazy and is affecting our health.” “The present generation does not lack in thinking. What they are lacking in is the power of imagination. Earlier, we used to read story books and tried to visualise it,” she adds.

  What research says

• In a 2011 experiment published in Science magazine, it was found that college students remembered less information when they knew they could easily access it later on the computer.
• A study led by Evan F. Risko of the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, found that “With the ubiquity of the internet, we are almost constantly connected to large amounts of information. And when that data is within reach, people seem less likely to rely on their own knowledge.” 
• India is one of the top countries in mobile phone use. According to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB International, the overall internet penetration in India is currently 31 per cent.
• In December 2016, the number of people using the internet was 432 million. This is projected to grow by another four to eight per cent in the current year.
• The smartphone is almost in everybody’s pocket today, especially in urban areas. This is another tool to ‘quick-check’ without having to go through readings.
• With such a reach — in the country, and worldwide, the influence of the service providers is bound to percolate to the users and consumers.
• With technology playing a bigger role in our lives, skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined while our visual skills have become better, found a research by Patricia Greenfield, professor of psychology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
• “Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary,” says Greenfield. “Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades,” she adds.

  A reality check

• The worldwide web is only about two decades old but can one imagine life without its ubiquitous presence in our daily life today?
• In his recently published book A World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Franklin Foer argues that big ticket companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are making inroads into intellectual property and privacy, besides destroying the possibility of contemplation.” It is ironical that while trying to find more about Foer, one has to click on the Google search engine.