Imagination, not technology, solves problems

Oleh Wan A. Hulaimi
New Straits Times
07-10-2011
Imagination, not technology, solves problems
Byline: Oleh Wan A. Hulaimi
Edition: New Sunday Times
Section: Main Section
Column: ...elsewhere

DOUGLAS Rushkoff invented "screenager" in 1997 to describe the plight of young emailers, computer-gamers, music downloaders; that class of web surfers all wrapped in their digital or televisual world.

Just over a decade later, consultant psychiatrist Dr Richard Graham, talking to the London Evening Standard, urges a greater preparedness in the mental health service to cope with young people whose lives have been "seriously impaired by unregulated time online, on-screen or in-game".
Some clinics in London are already treating young people for Internet addiction, but Dr Graham's own Capio Nightingale Hospital becomes the first to launch a Young Person Technology Addiction Service. "To transform screenagers back into teenagers," he says.

But the teenager is the shadow of the father, in a world where microchip-obsession is universal.

So besotted are we with the powers of the computer that we are already holding them to ourselves as a mirror. We are now thinking of our brains as a computer, and flattering ourselves by working frantically for an artificial monster that will - who knows - be like us and doing the thinking for us one day. Artificial Intelligence, as they say, AI, ai, aiy-ya-yah.

This is what Berkeley philosopher Herbert Dreyfus fears, that we are falling into the trap of thinking that the computer brain is analogous to our own grey matter, that we can, with a bit of application, replicate a brain and make it whirr, and presto, a thinking, feeling, emoting machine just like the ones born every day.

Our visit to the Capio Nightingale Hospital above is a glimpse into what is already happening to our young technology addicts.

How besotted we are with this magic that we have mistaken our invention for our master.

Perhaps there's some hidden wishful thinking here, that we are exposing our children to this intelligence in the hope that some of it will rub off somehow, like sitting cross-legged all day long before a guru.

"My lad's an ace with the computer, isn't he a clever boy?"

Unbeknown to us, maybe our young are already thinking like computers -- a snip here, a visit there, a quick jump into another page, a quick search and stir, a cut and a paste and there's the answer.

There are so many answers in there that we are overwhelmed with them, so much flow of dopamine, so addictive too. But hey, everyone is busy seeking answers, who's left to ask the questions now?

In Future Minds, Richard Watson asks it another way: "We have now become obsessed with asking whether something can be done that we leave little or no time to consider whether it should be done."

Perhaps that's because we, the inventors, are now in this peculiar position of modelling ourselves on our inventions. We think like computers and are in fact now at the drawing board designing a machine that we think will think like us.

We have thrown our children to the mercy of the monsters who are now not devouring, but shaping their brains. Yes, we are just beginning to realise that our brains are malleable, "plastic" as some neuroscientists now say, and neuroplasticity is bringing up surprises every day about the grey matter.

Alone among God's creations, we humans have a brain that doesn't rebuild itself, unlike other animals. But underneath our hat is a clump of substance with inroads and pathways that are ever changing according to use, and even making nonsense of that old Cartesian division of mind and body.

"Everything your 'immaterial' mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play the piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain," says psychiatrist Norman Doidge in his book The Brain that Changes Itself, based on new findings in neuroplasticity.

Nothing new here. Cosmetic surgeon Maxwell Maltz said much the same thing in his pop-psychology book Psychocybernetics in 1960, and it was hinted at as long ago as 1894 by the Spanish Nobel Laureate and neuro-anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal and quoted by Doidge: "(Our) organ of thought is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercise."

This is what memorising long passages, doing mental arithmetic, daydreaming and sitting in reflection in a quiet room do to our brains.

Yes, daydreaming is a mental exercise lost on our texting, surfing, gaming, easily bored young people. They see boredom in every page and ennui in every corner because their brains are now wired a different way and gone perhaps that capacity of their brain to think in an intuitive, non-linear, imaginative way.

Why is imagination important? Because it's imagination, not technology that solves problems.

Technology builds for us the tangled thoroughfare in our snarling city, imagination gives it shapes and trees and beauty.

"Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace," said American poet Dana Gioia in his address to students at Stanford University in 2007. So sad, so true.

* Wan A Hulaimi's latest book, A Map of Trengganu (written under his pen-name Awang Goneng), is now available in bookshops. He may be contacted at elsewhere@columnist.com

(Copyright 2011)