Comments on Neelima Narayanan's project description

I think that Neelima's idea of using pattern recognition exercises to stimulate and shape people's cognition is powerful. There is no question that this will work: given the right kinds of visual exercise, brain function changes, and we can exploit those changes to make people smarter. This is not only for old people experiencing dementia. Now that we know this is how to teach people skills, why are we still engaged in traditional education? We force millions of children to march through a routine at school, when school would be more profitably organized around learning systems that train people to do specific things that are needed by our culture. This has a creepy, dystopic ring to it if you think about rows of pallid, silent children sitting at patter recognition consoles, being programmed by staring at swirling patters. But, I believe that this kind of training is a must, anyway, because our brains are developing at an evolutionary pace, but technology and complexity are growing much faster (see
The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction by Rebecca Costa.. We are in danger of losing control of the technological world we have built, but maybe if we trained ourselves to be better able to handle complexity, we could adapt to rapid, inevitable change.

There is a goldmine of product opportunities in the area of interactive learning based on recent discoveries about the brain, I predict. This is the proper role of product design: to convert scientific discoveries into practical, economical objects or devices that enhance experience of being alive now on the scale of the entire culture. Product design is unrivaled as a distribution vector for powerful, world-changing ideas, and our skills are needed to ensure a humane, sustainable future.