System overload

Too many choices and tasks makes for poor health and worse thinking.

As a mentally bedraggled graduate student, I used to watch with envy my cousin, then in high school, working on her homework while simultaneously IM-ing, listening to a CD, watching TV, and chatting on the phone. "Multitasking" seemed to be a word coined just for her, and it used to give me a righteous headache.

In an office one has to juggle several tasks at once, and also stay on top of all the gossip. But at school, the whole thrust of enlightened education is to enable children to focus and think and do their best at each task.

Yet children, loaded with so many improving "opportunities", like tuitions and tennis class, and the challenge of "hanging out" (once known as playing) in a motorised world where friends live at opposite ends of the city and leisure happens in commercial environs, come early to the concept of dividing their time.

Doing more, do they get more? Look at the objectively slipping educational standards and grade inflation (against, it must be said, the larger amount of information the child of today has to absorb), the "praise economy", where the attempt is praised and not the result, and the vast range of entertainment (and "infotainment") brought straight into the child's room "" by modern equipment such as a TV, computer, cellphone, PlayStation, iPod.

Strictly from a health perspective, all this gadgetry can be damaging. A recent study of London teenagers by the UK's Sleep Council shows that a third got as little as four hours of sleep a night. (Eight or nine hours is ideal.) The researchers specifically linked this to electronic distractions, and noted the effect on quality as well as duration of sleep.

Almost a quarter of the surveyed teens usually fell asleep watching TV or listening to music, and all but 1 percent of them had a phone, TV or music system in their rooms. So they regularly went to school tired and cranky.

The sleep-deprived body and mind make up with a craving for sugary, high-fat foods that over time leads to weight gain. Given teenagers' sensitivity to the way they look, the lack of awareness that sleep deprivation can affect one's appearance surprised the researchers. Instead, teens listed mood, schoolwork, hair, skin, and weight as factors affecting their energy levels. The Sleep Council called this whole phenomenon "junk sleep".

Gadget devotion can have other consequences: for instance, the iPod. Its menu wheel can actually cause RSI, repetitive strain injury. The thumb motion required is, according to the British Chiropractic Association, "totally unnatural" and can "separate" the thumb joint every time.

The inflammation and pain that result may spread as far as the shoulder. In children, whose bones are still forming, the effects may only be seen in adulthood. In general, tiny gadgets with numerous features (inviting extended use), cause greater damage.

Australian principal Kerrie Murphy recently banned iPods from her school premises on the grounds that "People were not tuning into other people because they're tuned into themselves." In other words, they make children selfish and lonely. Inevitably, delightful extrapolations appeared in the news, such as "iPodding seriously damages your chances of getting laid."

What they mean, referring to adults, is that the possibility of chance encounters, with their life-enhancing effects, is slain, because each iPodder wanders about in his own aural (and social) cocoon. Is there a serious, long-term evolutionary disadvantage brewing for humanity?

But virtually all our single-user technologies have a similar effect. Buying a gadget is like moving into a new house. The options for customisation are so limitless, in terms of look and functionality, that users end up investing them with their personalities.

It takes hours of pleasure before a new kitchen mixie (let alone a computer) is thoroughly domesticated. These things talk back to us, and we impress ourselves upon them. For a while, they can take the place of friends.

This near-permanent state of distraction, brought on by technological opportunities immediately marketised, our global entertainment fixation, and the need for multitasking, clashes horribly with our inner cultural substance, which calls (in India as anywhere else) for a proper observance of the rituals and stages of life, apart from a calm appreciation of beauty through music, art, literature, colour, reason, spirituality. Our minds are shaped by our cultural past, which has given them the foundation as well as the astonishing flexibility with which we meet present challenges.

But we have to be able to keep training our minds, adult or child, and to do so we need to be taught how to think long-term rather than in step with economic life-cycles, that last a few minutes or a season.

There are already signs of a slow-down: witness the slow food movement. Just having 400 million working-age people is no guarantee of future wealth. Very soon, big money will chase the people who can think clearly, and imagine beyond the next season. Perhaps MBAs will be less in demand than historians of science, and grandmothers.