Hundreds, if not thousands, of new wearable gadgets appear every year on the market. All of them were designed and developed with a single purpose – to simplify our daily routines via their automation and computerization. Because of that simplification, many people tend to believe that all those wearables and applications make our minds lazier and us, well, dumber. But do they?
If life never changed in the last 10-20-30 years, these wearables most certainly would make us dumber. However, life did change, drastically. Whereas our brains – mmm… not so much. Nowadays, we need help to cope with the avalanche of data that continuously pours through our minds. Both our professional and personal lives sped up in pace and became more complex. Arrangements, to-do lists, kids’ activities schedules, work processes and business ideas, all these became draining and stressful.
Many thoughts pass through your mind every minute: “Don’t forget to call Mark tomorrow at 2pm”, “It’d be cool to add the search function to the project”, “Need to buy milk and apples on my way home”, “Josh asked to pick him up from school at 3pm”, “I had a coffee with Colin and spent $3.68”, “I ate one apple and one banana”, “Team, we need to redesign the algorithm and add Cholesky decomposition”, “Oh, there’s a traffic jam because of an accident”, and many others. It’s hard to remember all of them.
Imagine, with a mere finger-tap you can instantly memorize all the thoughts, and even more – automatically organize and streamline so many tasks that previously consumed so much of your time and attention. Just tap, speak and they automatically realize themselves – the notes land into your Calendar or Evernote, new items are added to your Shopping List or Reminders, spending is in your Budget app, your meal is counted by Calories Counter app, your brilliant idea is shared with your team via Slack, and the traffic accident info goes to Waze or the Google traffic app. All of them are accessed in the most natural way – with your voice. And you wouldn’t even reach for your smartphone to do that. It’s utterly simple, convenient, instant and totally stress-free. This is how the wearables work, just as a single example.
Yes, your mind will not focus on memorization and remembering of all these details, tasks and ideas. But, does it really need to? Your brain generates 70,000 or so thoughts every day and on average only 150 of them end up with a real result. So, do you really believe that your mind needs to remember everything? And, do you think that keeping all these thoughts makes you smarter? Well…
Our mind is the most powerful and amazing tool ever created by Mother Nature. And we believe it should be used efficiently, i.e. focusing on topics and ideas that truly matter, instead of distracting ourselves with all the little and trivial things.
So, does new wearable technology make people dumber? We don’t this so. Quite the contrary, the new technologies help people free their minds from many small (yet often necessary) details while enable them to focus on the main things and get become smarter through that.