Two dominant trends of our time, data and wellness, are bringing the world together as never before

by David Holt

In the West today, two top trends are the explosion of data everywhere in our lives and the movement toward health and wellness. Sitting on the back deck on a warm November afternoon, I am reading about both issues. Together they make a third trend: the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Western advances in data technologies are connecting the world to the benefit of the economies of Asia, while Eastern approaches to wellness are a welcome counterpoise to the stress and dis-ease of the West.

In Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr writes about the influence of the Internet on how our minds work. Light on Life is a book-length essay on yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, an Indian who has become one of the foremost teachers of this discipline in the West. Indeed, yoga studios are popping up in shopping malls, and while practitioners usually begin with the physical discipline, they often move on to the philosophical.

A writer of books and blogs, Carr confesses that it is getting hard for many educated people, himself included, to read long pieces of text. Yet we are very good at scanning and skimming. He suggests that the time we spend on the Internet is rewiring our brains, and research confirms this. Reading online teaches us to skim the surface, jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. This is superficial thinking—wide but thin. We are losing the ability to concentrate.

Carr recounts how when the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s eyesight began to fail and he learned to touch type, his style changed from one of “thoughts to puns” and he wrote in a “telegram” style. About the same time, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time-and-motion studies converted factory workers into efficient, if joyless, automata. He looked for the “one best method” for any task. His philosophy: “In the past, man has been first. In the future, the system must be first.”

Today Google is looking for its own comprehensive system: to build an “artificial intelligence on a large scale.” As its search engine gives us what we want, it changes how we think. And the more we click, the better the company does. “It is in their economic interest to drive us to distraction,” says Carr. No wonder so much of what we call innovation is entertaining and convenient, but at the same time destructive of personal relationships and even the planet. Carr cites the “dark prophecy” of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey: “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

As we become faster and shallower, we lose the ability to focus. We have less of the quality that can be called mind. We have no tolerance for inconvenience and are often anxious. Our reactions become like those of the exhausted electro-shocked rats waiting for the next jolt. “Economy declines by 0.3%,” screamed a recent headline. It doesn’t take much to set us off anymore.

Iyengar takes on similar themes. The ancient yogis, he writes, noticed all the chaos in nature and in our own minds. As western science turned its objectivity outward, the yogis looked inward. An early conclusion was that it is the nature of our minds to be self-deceiving—to mistake surfaces for reality and to overreact to stimuli. It was only through discipline that the mind could be freed from its inherent waywardness. One of the practices learned along the way, and one not to be taken for granted, was the ability to concentrate.

“Man is trying more and more to dominate the environment rather than control himself,” Iyengar writes. “Trying to dominate nature with technology instead of trying to adapt to it, we become both weak and brittle. We use our bodies so little—moving from bed to car to desk and back again—that we have little awareness of them. Instead we get caught up and excited by any external movement.” TV and Internet, anyone?

Now consider the real innovators in our society and the qualities of their minds. Alexander Graham Bell never owned a telephone; he considered it a distraction. Einstein’s undemanding job at the patent office gave him lots of time to think. Darwin took long walks after lunch. Newton’s best work occurred when Cambridge University was closed by the plague and he was forced to spend months at home.

When I was in college, I spent time in the household of Claude Shannon, whose “mathematical theory of communication” laid the groundwork for the digital age. He also placed cryptography on a mathematical footing, built ingenious devices such as a mouse in a maze to demonstrate artificial intelligence, and wrote the first sophisticated program to play chess. When not juggling or unicycling, he spent long hours working alone.

Indeed, the common element among all of these creative thinkers is a fascination with nature and the ability to spend long periods of time concentrating. Einstein said he wanted to know God’s thoughts; all else was detail. The advanced yogi seeks to experience the unity that underlies all things. In essence, the goal is the same.

David Holt is a writer and consultant on strategy and communications. He can be reached at dholt@eastlink.ca.