The smart products we are stupid enough to buy

The other day I was reading this article on how we are being lured to buy and use the smart products nowadays. For example, all of us use the toothbrush, floss and interdental brushes, or at least one of them, to clean our teeth every day. There comes the new Oral B Genius 9000, the smartest of all smart toothbrushes. To use the toothbrush you have to attach your phone to your bathroom mirror at mouth level so that its camera can keep an eye on you as it takes you on a "28-day plaque journey".

As you brush, the screen lits up telling you which bit of your mouth you are working on. This might have been smart, only you know the answer already. It times your brushing (a task you don't require) and while it does so, it distracts you from the job by telling you (incorrectly) what the weather is like outside, and what is happening in the world. "Impressive!" it says when you are done. Again, you being an adult, no longer need congratulating on having brushed your teeth.

The data from your brushing is duly logged, against which every future act of brushing could be compared - turning the oral hygiene routine into a fun competition against yourself. If you ask me, I shall never use this type of toothbrush app. The five minutes or so a day I spend cleaning teeth are a time of relative calm, not data-gathering activity. I am going to keep them that way.

Another smart invention is the smart clothes pegs. Peggy, being tested in Australia by Unilever, is a plastic peg containing a thermometer and a hygrometer that sends messages to your phone that say: "Hi, rain clouds are on the way, let's dry the washing tomorrow." The company is claiming that Peggy will allow parents to spend more time with children. This makes no sense as the main thing that keeps parents from children is not drying out the washing on rainy days - it's staring at their smartphones.

Fitbit and Jawbone have already turned half the population into competitive walking bores. Oral B smart toothbrush and Peggy take it one step beyond. Even more promising are smart umbrellas and smart wallets that discourage you from losing them by reminding you every time they stray too far from your phone. Yet these sound like a real nuisance - whenever you leave your umbrella inside your own front door and go to sit on the sofa, your phone tells you your umbrella is out of radius.

The most unwelcome "advance" of all is the smart tampon. This is a normal tampon attached to a wire that connects to a sensor clipped to your underpants. Every time the sensor thinks it's time for a new one it alerts your phone. It's difficult to imagine why anyone would want their body to be wired up in this way and, in any case, there is no need. Women already have two methods of knowing when to change tampons: looking at their watches and listening to their bodies.

The more we learn about the Internet of Things, the more I think we are slipping into a world of make-believe. The giddy growth of smart technology is both easy to understand and a mystery. The growing supply is no surprise. Manufacturers make this stuff because they can. The technology exists and it is quite cheap. Thanks to venture capitalists, there is no shortage of people to finance it.
On the demand side, it remains a puzzle. The fact that people are so willing to pay for non-solutions to non-problems is the best evidence of the irrationality of the consumer market.

If we want such smart gadgets, we must be dumb. And not only that: Smart technology is making us dumber. If we no longer have to look at the sky before putting the washing out, and if our favourite conversation is who walked/ brushed/squeezed for longest, our brains will soon become in far more urgent need of exercise than our gums or leg muscles.

Two questions to ask every day

One friend sent an interesting post, and towards the end, there were two questions. These are not just any old questions though, but the questions that the famous inventor, author and diplomat Ben Franklin used to ask himself each day.

What are the two questions? Well, in the morning he asked himself: What good shall I do this day?

And in the evening he asked himself: What good have I done today?

Simple but powerful. These two questions bring our focus back on doing the essential things during the day. In that way we won't be wasting time in doing meaningless, redundant activities. When we take stock of our day's work in the evening, we take ownership for it, rather than complaining or blaming others for not not achieving something. And if we have been successful in accomplishing what we wished to do in the morning, it gives us reason to feel satisfied and happy. So if you also wish to feel the same as I have started feeling, you need to ask these two questions from one of the most productive and creative people in the world!

Fitbit craze

Have you heard of the 'Fitbit'? It is a watch-strap like wearable device which keeps track of many of our body parameters, like heart rate, blood pressure, etc., including the steps we take during a day, converting them into miles/kilometers. Both of my daughters bought it as soon as it was launched some time ago.

However, I am not a big fan of such devices, as I feel there is no need to monitor such parameters every day or after every activity. See, our body responds to daily activities in many different ways, hence these parameters keep fluctuating over the day. But equally true is that our body is constantly trying to balance these all the time. And the good thing is that we can 'sense' these changes easily as these are expressed quite well as bodily reactions like fever, tiredness, allergies, muscle soreness, cough, etc., or/and emotional responses like feelings of sadness, despair, anxiety, elation, etc.

Many users of these activity-trackers have also harboured suspicions over their accuracy. One research study recently found that the pulse-monitoring technology used in its wrist-bound Surge and Charge devices like Fitbit was "highly inaccurate during elevated physical activity". Researchers from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, had 43 subjects wear the devices as they ran, jogged and jumped rope, among other activities, and then compared the readings with those of an electrocardiogram. During moderate to high-intensity exercise, Fitbit's sensor was off by an average of about 19 beats a minute.

In another study on Jawbone and Fitbit devices, it was found that both devices overcounted and undercounted as the activities intensified.

Both these studies were not peer-reviewed, neither repeated; so no concrete conclusion can be drawn from these. However, it indicates that it is difficult to believe the accuracy of these devices. Then what's the point of wearing such devices??

If you are checking your vital parameters very frequently through the day, and notice changes, which are bound to be, you are heading towards a downward spiral of obsession for 'perfect readings' which never happen for anyone! Our bodies are unique, and always in flux, responding to different environments, both external and internal; hence the concept of having a record of these vital statistics itself is stress-inducing. I will rather believe my intuition, sense my physical reactions and emotional state, and if there is something unexplained, then will measure these with proper instruments!

Learn to develop emotional granularity

When people or situation gets us down, do we feel just generally "bad"? Or do we have more precise emotional experiences, such as grief or despair or frustration?

In psychology, people with finely tuned feelings are said to exhibit "emotional granularity". Emotional granularity isn't just about having a rich vocabulary; it's about experiencing the world, and ourselves, more precisely. This can make a difference in our life. In fact, there is growing scientific evidence that precisely tailored emotional experiences are good for us, even if those experiences are negative.

According to a collection of studies, finely grained, unpleasant feelings allow people to be more agile at regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them. Perhaps surprisingly, the benefits of high emotional granularity are not only psychological. People who achieve it are also likely to have longer, healthier lives. They go to the doctor and use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalised for illness. Cancer patients, for example, have lower levels of harmful inflammation when they more frequently categorise, label and understand their emotions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in US, and author of the book 'How Emotions Are Made' discovered emotional granularity in the 1990s. Her lab asked hundreds of volunteers to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months. Everyone they tested used the same stock of emotion words, such as "sad" and "angry" and "afraid", to describe their experiences.

Our brain, they showed, in a very real sense constructs our emotional states - in the blink of an eye, outside of our awareness - and people who learn diverse concepts of emotion are better equipped to create more finely tailored emotions. This is why emotional granularity can have such influence on our well-being and health: it gives our brain more precise tools for handling the myriad challenges life throws at us.

Suppose we're facing the city's troubles with water contamination. Suppose that each morning, as we turn on the tap, we experience an unpleasant feeling of general badness. It's important to note that we've created that vague feeling of badness. Neuroscience has shown that human brains are not "reactive" organs that merely respond to the world in some predetermined way, such as spiking our blood pressure when we see the words "non-potable water". Rather, our brain regulates our body's energy needs proactively, spiking our blood pressure in anticipation of what might come next, based on experience. This process is like keeping a budget for our body. And just like a financial budget, a body budget needs to be kept balanced in order to be healthy.

So in the above example of water contamination, our brain anticipates a threat and our cortisol level spikes, readying our body for action, but a feeling of general badness calls for no specific action. We merely feel awful because our brain has made a needless withdrawal from our body budget. And the next time we're in a similar situation, our brain goes through the same process. Again we feel lousy and trapped by our circumstances. Over time, a poorly calibrated body budget can pave the road to illness.

With higher emotional granularity, however, our brain may construct a more specific emotion, such as righteous indignation, which entails the possibility of specific actions. We might telephone a friend and rant about the water crisis, or we might Google "lead poisoning" to learn how to better protect our children. We are no longer an overwhelmed spectator but an active participant. We have choices. This flexibility ultimately reduces wear and tear on our body (for example, unnecessary surges of cortisol).

The good news is that emotional granularity is a skill, and many people can increase theirs by learning new emotion concepts. Instead of grouping all negative emotions as 'bad', we need to feel them: is it awful, frustration, gloom, anxiety, helplessness or disgust! Schoolchildren who learn more emotion concepts have improved social behaviour and academic performance, as research by the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence shows.

If we incorporate such concepts into our daily life, our brain will learn to apply them automatically. Emotion concepts are tools for living. The bigger our tool kit, the more flexibly our brain can anticipate and prescribe actions, and the better we can cope with life.