Discover Shocking facts:Why World is Becoming Dumber

People love one thing and that’s convenience. We have inbuilt dictionaries in the smartphones and on the computers as well. We are using technology to do almost everything for us. Few bright minds write these codes and we get an app that does so many things for us. We have apps for reading books, assistants to help us remember the birthdays, meetings and software to do tasks like trading, finding the best restaurant almost everything is happening at the press of the button.

The conventional Bell curve

The bell curve says majority of the population remains at the center of the curve and is always an average . Now there cannot be any debate on the fact that most of the people are lying in the middle of this curve with average IQ. Story becomes interesting as we analyze how the artificial intelligence and big data are shaping our perceptions of reality. Recent elections in the US and closer to home in India , adoption of social media analytics by the political parties led to unexpected win by the concerned parties. We can argue now that our collective thoughts are being scanned and analyzed by the super intelligent algorithms and then they give out a very new version of fake, real looking fact. We all are very proud of our information seeking ability which is largely from the same pool where we send our own inputs – Internet.

Some of the examples of how information is being used now.

1. You get a sore throat and you go online and find the blog on this and get medicine.
2. You want to know best college; you go online and select the college.
3. You want to go for a movie; you go online and look for reviews.
4. Now you are even upgrading your skills by looking at videos, reading articles.
5. You want a perfect match ….you go online and experiment!!

 Cold facts: Around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today (7.5 Billion )

• Today, nearly 17% of the world’s adult population is still not literate; two thirds of them women, making gender equality even harder to achieve.

• The scale of illiteracy among youth also represents an enormous challenge; an estimated 122 million youth globally are illiterate, of which young women represent 60.7%.

• The 67.4 million children who are out of school are likely to encounter great difficulties in the future, as deficient or non-existent basic education is the root cause of illiteracy.

• With some 775 million adults lacking minimum literacy skills, literacy for all thus remains elusive.

Check out how much time we spend on Internet.    TIME we spend on internet.

The biggest increase has been among young adults, with time spent online almost tripling from 10 hours and 24 minutes each week in 2005 to 27 hours and 36 minutes in 2014. In total, the average adult spends more than 20 hours online a week, which includes time spent on the internet at work.May 11, 2015

Teens now spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms, while 30% of all time spent online is now allocated to social media interaction. And the majority of that time is on mobile – 60% of social media time spent is facilitated by a mobile device.

The social media platforms themselves are evolving their tools and options to further attract and engage new audiences (e.g. advent of live-streaming features and 360-degree photos/videos). Newer social platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram, and now Musical.ly, are also competing for their share of the market. Accordingly, brands are jumping into social media with social media ad spend expected to reach $36 billion in 2017.

IQ is a number meant to measure people cognitive abilities (intelligence) in relation to their age group. An I.Q between 90 and 110 is considered average; over 120, superior.Roughly 68% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115. The average range between 70 and 130, and represents about 95% of the population.

 SO we are bound to be DUMBER as the world population grows 

Research related questions and Answers https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/IQ/1950-2050/

Every second of every day our brain is bombarded by way too much data than we can possibly process and because nothing is more important to our survival to the species than survival all our visual data, auditory data is funneled to a sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala.

The amygdala is our danger detector.  It’s our early warning system.  It literally combs through all of the sensory input looking for any kind of a danger on putting in on high alert and it evolved during an era of human evolution that was of the immediate type, the tiger in the bush.  You would hear a rustle in the leaves and you would think tiger, not wind and the point—one percent of the time that it was a tiger it saved your life, but today the amygdala literally calls our attention to all the negative stories and if you see a thousand stories you’re going to focus on the negative ones and the media takes advantage of this and you know the old saw if it bleeds it leads.  Well that’s why 90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because that’s what we pay attention to.

And as it turns out we also have a number of what are called cognitive biases.  The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman first addressed these and these cognitive biases keep us negative.  We have a negativity bias, which is the tendency to give far more information to negative details than positive ones and the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to selectively look at information or see information that confirms our preexisting notions, which is fine except that our preexisting notions are typically negative and therefore, we’re reconfirming our negative expectations.

So ultimately we are kept in this negative state of mind and when the amygdala goes on high alert because much of the dangers around us today are probabilistic dangers, a pandemic might strike, an asteroid might hit, we end up in a situation that our amygdala is always on high alert and it’s screening out the positive news and allowing in the negative news.

We all are living in the ocean of Negativity.

On an average each day we are being bombarded with lot of filth in every conceivable manner.

There are many programmes which are aimed to showcase only the crime. This is being done in the name of spreading awareness. Our national news channels are also showing only the dark, irrelevant and cheap journalism. We are not even getting positivity in the news papers , all newspapers are filled with lot of advertisements and all the channels are busy in fighting for TRP.

World is bound to be dumber in the years to come here is the main reason why it will happen..

1. Cartoons infuse violent behavior in children: If you carefully look at Doraemon cartoon you can always understand that it infuses violence in the tender minds. In this cartoon Nobita continuously gets beaten by his classmate and friend Gian for no reason. It sows the seeds of vengeance because Gian always messes with Nobita because he doesn’t like Nobita. Similar is the case with Tom and Jerry because we can always see Tom running after Jerry to give a bad time for him. According to the experts in American Academy of Paediatrics, continuous watching of cartoons makes them violent, and arrogant.
2. Bad for health: It is a common complaint among mothers that these children refuse to even move when they watch Doraemon or Perman. If they go on watching them for hours their eyesight is likely to be impaired. It is likely to happen that they develop problems in the spine as well if they sit in one position for a long time. Moreover, they get blotted up because they are not active but stay idle for long hours.
3. They begin to treat these characters as idols:There are many cases of reported death of children who tried to imitate Shaktiman because of the fact that they start to treat these cartoon characters as role models. These idols, often have some or the other supernatural powers. These role models, even though, they fall from the 20th floor, they will not turn up their toes. If our child tries to imitate this thinking it is real, imagine the situation?

What we used to do earlier with our kids (1900 untill ICE age began)

• Your grandparents would take you to their room and perhaps open a story book and read something to you , explaining you the story, sharing the morale , answering your questions and obviously the words they would use to describe and the body language, gestures etc somehow used to rub off to us and we were learning many useful social things. This thing is now missing.,
• Quality time – While this was a favorite time for us as kids,it was equally a good time for our parents and grand parents.It used to create a unique personal bonding between us. Now your kids are watching TV cartoon and you are busy with your own stuff. So emotional intelligence is going lower and lower and this void is being filleby Anonymous admirers and friends from some remote corner of the world. This lack of Love and connect closer to home is a major reason people are going online to find someone to talk to.
• Adult Content- There are cartoons and TV shows where you may find the language full of slangs, and this is a common observation now that kids are using words that are not meant for their age.
• Lack of constructive work- We only get close to 8 hours/day to do something worthwhile, cartoons and TV shows have been a major reason , we don’t get to see kids or adults going for any recreational activity like music,arts etc . Students and young kids consider watching shows a favorite past time activity.
• Lowering of Attention Span- How frequently you switch channels is something that needs no convincing.We all do this as TV shows News channels show us lot of TV commercicials.

Advertising standards:TRAI mentions no TV channel can show ad for more than 12 minutes in an hour. There are approx. 140 channels who were reviewed for this and here is the report on how much ad they are showing :

 So the situation is like we all are being treated by these media platforms as a dumping ground for their products and we all are watching them helplessly. This leads to shorter attention span and irritation.

Summary: Excessive use of Apps and watching TV, spending time on the internet is counter productive for most of us as we are average people and our chances of using all of this for productive purposes is doubtful and we must maintain healthy balance between creativity by ourselves and creativity by others( online TV soap shows etc )

RisingAbhi