FLAKES: The crucial 10 per cent

I wonder if you ever get to the end of your weekly Flakes article without being interrupted, and by none other than your beloved phone.

You can ignore the legitimate claims of your spouse, your baby, your boss and other assorted unmentionables but the electronic clamour of your phone is a summons from “she who must be obeyed.”

Whenever that irresistible “ping” sounds out, you invariably stop whatever you were doing and attend to your phone.

The “spoiled phone syndrome” is not unique to Kenya. At this moment I am seated in the public transport system of an advanced country. I am surrounded by people busy attending to their gadgets.

Their ears are stuffed with headphones connected to their phone. Their fingers are glued to the keyboard and their eyes are pasted on the screen. It is clear that their minds are also filled with content selected from the phone.

In a densely populated city, people are surrounded by other people, but they ignore their fellow men and women in order to focus on their gadgets.

UNUSED BRAINPOWER

I was thinking about this while reading an article about the myth of the underused brain. For a long time (I am sure alongside many others) I have believed that I am only using about 10 per cent of my brainpower.

Apparently this fallacy was spread by Dale Carnegie of How to Win Friends and Influence People fame.

However Barbara Sarhakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge University, states that this was either a made-up statistic or it is a misstatement of the fact that 90 per cent of brain cells are designed to feed the 10 per cent of brain neurons that are actually engaged in thinking.

Oh dear! It is humbling to think that I don’t have all that unused potential after all, since my feeding cells are not about to convert to thinking cells in a hurry! And does this imply that for every nine human “feeders” there is likely to be only one human thinker?

An analogue reader may not be aware that an “app” is a computer programme that you can copy from the Internet onto your phone or computer.

It is usually (or if I am really honest, unusually) designed to do something that you consider useful. Some apps are free and others can be purchased for a small fee.

When I was first introduced to the idea of an app I immediately spent several hours and several thousand shillings copying dozens of apps onto my computer.

Now it is several months since I added any more to my collection. I regularly use about five apps and there are about 10 others, from my collection of 50, that I use occasionally.

The rest are a waste of space.

I don’t want to add to the proliferation of invented statistics but I am sure that I read somewhere that less than half of the food that is harvested for human use actually reaches the mouth of any human being, and the situation is even worse for bottled water where I read that less that only a fifth actually touches the parched throat of any person!

NO ONE HOME

These examples of human inefficiency may disturb you, but they also give hope because they demonstrate how small a percentage of anything you need in order to produce a positive effect.

So maybe it does not matter so much that so many people are completely distracted from productivity by their mobile phones as long as 10 to 20 per cent of the people are still talking to one another face to face and are still working!

I remember a poem from my KCSE set book that talked about “people everywhere but never a soul at home.” In that context it referred to British people who lived in the colonies but forever yearned for their “mother country.”

Who knew that a few decades later the world of telecommunications and the Internet would become the mother country of millions of young people. Thank God that we can still reach them through their medium of choice.

However, this Saturday, feed and think.