The Hindu Business Line : The Pharaoh’s Curse

Legend credits the Egyptian god Theuth with the invention of geometry, astronomy, games and dice. His greatest invention, though, was writing. According to Plato, the Pharaoh Thamus admired many creations of Theuth, but he disapproved of the concept of writing and refused to support it. Thamus is believed to have said (and I paraphrase) : Writing will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust that which is written and not remember of their own will. Your invention is an aid not to memory but for reminder.

Alas, the pharaoh’s curse is alive and well after all these millennia. A couple of mildly embarrassing incidents recently made me realise how true his prediction is, and how dangerous a dependence on external devices can get.

The first was when I took an old buddy out for lunch in my new car. It was a gesture of remorse - I had forgotten her birthday for the first time in years and she was worried about my health. I had to sheepishly admit that I had had a systemic breakdown – in my cell-phone, that is, which meant that all my reminders had gone awry.

When we emerged, I had the sinking realisation that I couldn’t summon the car from the parking valet – I had no clue what the new car’s number was. ‘It’s not your fault,’ my friend told me comfortingly, if a tad maliciously, ‘after all, you hadn’t had the time to feed in the number into your cell-phone.’ Rescue was finally effected by a call to my young son whose memory has not (yet) been atrophied by a reliance on gadgets.

Later, I wandered into a music concert where I was exuberantly greeted by another long-lost friend. How long she had been lost – or if, indeed, she was a friend - was not very clear, since I recognised her face, but nothing else about her. The rest of the evening was spent in a fog – I had to put up with the ignominy of not being able to introduce her to my visibly amused group.

My son gleefully poked me every time The Face loomed near and said, ‘Watch out, here she comes.’ The sublime music soared meaninglessly over me while I wrestled furiously with my fading grey cells to isolate who she was and why she seemed so familiar. The elusive memory came back to me suddenly and I erupted in a triumphant “yesss”, much to the disapproval of the silent audience around me. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I told myself comfortingly, ‘it’s the fault of the cell-phonewallahs.’

Surely, in this day and age, it should be possible to make a cell-phone that surreptitiously takes a snap of a unknown-yet-familiar face, then using face recognition pattern, scrolls through the snaps in the contact list and softly whispers the right name into the ear through Bluetooth? (The operative phrase, of course, is ‘right name’ – you can manage a situation like this by deftly avoiding paragraphs in which names occur, but using the wrong name could have disastrous consequences.)

The accuracy levels of face-recognition software are, I believe, still suspect, but I don’t think such intelligently designed products are a figment of science fiction any more. Consider some of the gadgets designed to make us more efficient while protecting our synapses from undue wear and tear.

So you’d like to avoid root canals this year? What you need is the Oral B Triumph 9900, the über-toothbrush that uses real time feedback via a remote SmartGuide Monitor (a mini colour LCD screen) to keep track of how well you are brushing, obtaining data wirelessly from the handle itself. If you don’t mind being nagged in the bathroom, that is. “Hullo, lazybones, you haven’t covered that quadrant properly. Don’t brush so hard. Oy, time to replace the brush-head.”

I wonder if all that badgering won’t be stress-inducing – on the other hand, no longer do you need to worry whether you’re doing a good job with your teeth. Just imagine - the brain power thus released could be used for so many more productive purposes.

Efficient shopping? Let’s face it, if you go shopping without a list, you’ll probably stand dazed in the middle of Nilgiris, stunned into silence by the number of options around you – or come back home with an amazing number of goodies that you had no idea existed on the shelves and that you had no idea you needed at all.

Sadly, if you’re like me, years of using the mouse and keyboard will have permanently altered the shape of your hands, so you can no longer grip a pen or pencil, and when you do attempt to write, your calligraphy will have deteriorated into an undecipherable scrawl that can only be decoded by a chemist.

Fear not, help is near in the shape of SmartShopper – a digital gizmo that you can hang in your kitchen. It features an LCD readout, thermal printer, and built-in voice recognition system. Simply press the button and say ‘Basmati Rice”, and that’s been added to your shopping list! On your way to the store, you can print out the list on thermal paper. Now all I need is for it to be incorporated with a scanning eye which takes a dekko into my fridge and shelves, compares the contents with its shopping database and makes up next grocery list by itself – or even better, faxes it to the store for delivery, with an instruction to my online banking system for direct payment. (A faint memory stirs, about Net-enabled refrigerators being all the rage in digital homes back in the dotcom boom, and then going bust, but no, I can’t remember more, hmmm …).

Isn’t it mildly ironic that while Moore’s Law chugs on inexorably ensuring that the thinking capacity of gadgets and gizmos rises exponentially, an inverse process seems to be taking place in our brains? I postulate a Chadha’s law which predicts the loss of brain cells directly proportionate to the number of gadgets you use. With every new-age gizmo that promises to help you achieve better quality of life without having to overhaul your lifestyle, comes the sting of atrophying mental and physical faculties. Sometime in the dim and distant past, I recall a younger version of me who could effortlessly remember long lists of phone numbers, and had an encyclopaedic memory for trivia. Today, my father can hand-total a list of numbers faster than I can punch them into my calculator; my son recites phone numbers faster than I can pull them up from my cell-phone. Perhaps the Pharaoh had it right, and this dependence on external devices isn’t such a good plot after all. All the recent research has indicated frequent mind flexing improves mental processing and keeps the brain young.

Ah, well, for those of us unwilling to revert to a Luddite era, here too modern technology offers hope. Already, a host of brain-stimulating products is available, offering a range of cerebral calisthenics to keep those grey cells stimulated. The Brain Fitness Programme from Posit uses audio exercises to “repair the machinery” of the brain”. Nintendo’s Brain Age puts you through activities ranging from math problems to a version of rock, paper and scissors to provide a mental workout. And I’m sure that sooner or later, they’ll figure out some sort of DIY gizmo that you can strap onto your head and give your synapses a quick surge of power to rejuvenate them. What’s that you say? You won’t remember to play the whatsitsname game or put on the thingumajig? No problemo, just key in a reminder into your cell-phone – as long as you also remember to charge the phone and remember to take backups of your data.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd.)