Two things I read this week clicked together in an interesting way, related to the psychological dimensions our recent explorations about context-aware systems.
The first piece was an article in The Economist about recent research on schizophrenia. The second was a scene in a new science-ficiton novel by Charles Stross called Accelerando....
The Economist piece summarized the key findings of some recent experiments on the nature of schizophrenia. They seem to suggest that schizophrenics are actually able to see more clearly - literally. For instance they are much less likely to be fooled by well-known optical illusions. How does this happen? They don't waste any brainpower on processing context - the surrounding information that is what plays with our perception and causes the illusion. The doctor who performed the research described schizophrenia sufferers as "flooded with an undifferentiated mass of incoming sensory data".
On the other hand, in Stross' science-fiction story, there is a scene where the protagonist Manfred Macx is mugged on a street in Amsterdam. One of the items that is taken are his eyeglasses, which are a sort of hyper-context-aware supercomputer that overlays data on the world through lens displays. MAnfred immediately goes into a sort of schizoid cognitive breakdown - his "memory" is offline, optical compensators that have been correcting his vision for years are gone, and he finds the unmediated world harsh and discomforting. Without assistive technologies, he can't make sense of his context anymore.
Earlier this year I had some distress over losing my car's GPS unit in a burglary. I think the difficulty I had reverting to normal dead-reckoning/paper-map navigation is a very primitive form of this new kind of mental disorder, which will occur when people are unable to use or disconnected from context-aware system they have come to depend on.
There are some related implications - we could think of our current context-aware systems, and the reasons they don't always succeed, because they create schizo-like experiences for the user... ignoring key contextual information and the like.
Another implication, if we don't start building context-awareness into information systems soon, all of the current concerns about information overload could turn from worries about lost productivity, into real concerns about serious mental disorders. Data smog-induced schizophrenia could be the RSI/carpal tunnel syndrome of the future.
I think this is a natural abstraction which happens. We use tools until we no longer think about them. If there were no gas/electricity for 3 or more days, what would you eat and how would you prepare it? Your food infrastructure is probably mostly subconscious until it's disrupted.
Anecdote: several years ago after 10 years of daily computer use, I took a 2 week vacation and when I started using keyboards again developed an rsi-like problem. So would the pain have happened normally or was did it happen because I'd deprived my hands of their daily fix of keyboarding?
Nit: I think Macx's mugging happened in Edinburgh :-)
Posted by: Ken | November 15, 2005 at 10:26 PM