The 39th Annual International Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition was recently held in Tokyo. It has been held in Japan since 1986, and the organizers call it the third such event in scale after Medtrade in the USA and REHACARE in Germany.
Unlike their European and American counterparts, the Japanese, as usual, placed the main emphasis not on pharmaceuticals or prostheses, but on computerized innovations. The main condition of this exhibition is that goods that can be classified as medical devices are not allowed there.
In this case, we are still talking about people. Although this time there were almost less of them than super-baking machines. Robots were buzzing on almost all the stands. For example, automatic adult diapers with flush, similar to a regular toilet, or a one-armed mechanism on wheels, ready to bring a cup of tea and pick up a fallen table knife from the floor.
Watching the robot housekeeper and its young owner lounging on the couch with a small control panel in his hands, one involuntarily thinks that this is too frank presentation of a machine, theoretically designed for pensioners and disabled people, but in practice replacing a fully capable man's arms and legs.
Who among us in childhood did not dream of a robot that would, like in a fantasy novel, do all the housework, do homework, and walk the dog? But the rejection of physical labor, which, according to Friedrich Engels, made a man out of a monkey, is fraught with serious and so far poorly predictable consequences. This is not just about the refusal of a modern resident of a big city from some unnecessary household skills.
Perhaps we are giving up entire areas of our own brain - they just "fall asleep." After all, our brain consists of neurons, that is, nerve cells. They transmit signals from the body to the brain or within the brain itself, and are responsible for the information delivered from the brain to the muscles and internal organs. If nothing bothers the neurons, they "shut down" over time.
How can the loss of everyday skills affect their activity? There is a phenomenon that neuropsychologists call sensory integration. Its essence is that many different signals interact in the brain. They interact, and not just be transmitted back and forth in a given direction, since they pass through a very intricate, closely intertwined neural network, exchanging impulses.
For example, a signal from the pads of our fingers that the hand has groped for something sharp or soft comes to the brain, simultaneously exciting the speech center. Therefore, in a situation where a person is struck by a stroke and the speech center is damaged, for its early recovery it is traditionally recommended not only to train the vocal apparatus or listen to what others say, but also to knit, sew, and sort out grain. These actions help revitalize the speech center. Also, for example, repetitive movements with two legs or hands at once help to restore the parallel work of the cerebral hemispheres.
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Well, if there are no violations, it is just that a person will no longer perform such actions, what then? Will unclaimed brain areas fall asleep? There is no clear answer to this question yet. Humanity has entered the era of machines not so long ago, and only one or two generations ago it began to abandon activity, which for its far from distant ancestors was a forced set of everyday skills.
We still sometimes write, not print (by the way, according to some neuropsychologists, different brain centers are also responsible for these two actions), we sew buttons on ourselves, we can clean the floor with a rag, not a vacuum cleaner, hammer a nail with a hammer, beating off our fingers and getting an incomparable sensation … But cars are increasingly entering our lives. Our children are losing the ability to write - they can only type. In parallel, as they say, the demand for speech therapists is growing.
The only comfort is that all these problems concern only the “golden billion”. For those living on less than a dollar a day, the problem of loss of everyday skills is not worth it. And in the future, this, by the way, may give their children some evolutionary advantages over ours …
IVAN PREOBRAZHENSKY
PUBLICIST, POLITICAL ANALYST
"Around the World" December 2012