language: Cannot communicate without it. But, is it effective enough?
For e.g. I am writing this blog, converting my thought streams into words. But thoughts are much faster and free flowing. The conversion of thoughts into symbols, not only makes it slow, but also make it counter-productive.
Most of my fascinating thoughts, comes into being in my morning drive to work. Sometimes I am a poet, then a philosopher, a strategist, a geek. I often wonder, if I could have noted some of those down when they brushed my mind. Then I wonder, if I did, it would hinder the flow. Good thing, I cannot write while I drive, so the thoughts keep coming on.
So I wonder, if it would be a good idea to have invented mind printers, where it can print what I think, then and there, so that I do not have to take time to write them down. Then I think, well, if it is printed, someone got to read it, and reading too takes time. So I think more, may be it is not mind printers we need, rather mind recorders and the records can be re-played, so we also need mind players. But what would be the right encoding/decoding mechanism to use in these. If we are to convert them to a language and back, there will be a cost, a loss factor. What if we would have some form of streaming, so that it can be fed in with least loss. I know that the brain is about a set of chemical reactions, so if we record the chemical reactions, and re-play, how would that work. Then the question is, if chemical reactions in one’s brain is the same as another.
I often see how fast the kids are learning. The power they have to articulate ideas out of nowhere. And we bother teaching them how to write characters and form words out of them. Sometimes, it wonders me, how fast they learn, a complex language as Sinhalese, to both read and write. And then, when I look at them, outside the book, how creative they are and how thoughtful they are, I feel like, it might be a waste of time to let them sit and make words out of a set of given characters – they can do much better than that. They can talk, they can listen and understand and respond accordingly – and may be by pushing them to learn how to read and write, we are hindering their learning.
The time it took to write this whole thing down, and the time it takes you to read it, both of them take time away form us. Read and write: is so inefficient. Now that, we are in a technology age where we can touch the computer, and it can read to us and understand what we talk to it, may be it is time to think of a better way than to read and write. Sorry, but the current Google search technology will get outdated with that – but is that not what we want?
Printing was a revolution for mankind. It is time to think of the next.
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