Unlearning 101

The Secret to a Long Life?

Walter Breuning, the world's oldest man, died yesterday. When asked his secrets to a long life his top response was:

"Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. Every change is good."

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The Future Will Require a Whole Lotta Unlearning

If something doubles just ten times it is one thousand (1024 times to precise) larger. This is an important concept to grasp if you want to better contemplate the future.

Why? Because no fewer than nine technological trends—semiconductors, data storage, bandwidth, genomics, gene sequencing, robotics, nanotechnology, brain scanning and scientific knowledge—are doubling anywhere from every 6 to 18 months.

To put this in some perspective, consider the following examples.

If the military is currently deploying 1000 robots in Afghanistan but the number is doubling every year by 2020 that means there will be one million robots deployed in the country. This will change warfare as we know it.

If Wal-Mart is currently deploying 1 million RFID (radio frequency identification) tags but that number is doubling every year this suggests by 2020 that there will be 1 billion RFID tags deployed. This will fundamentally transform the global supply chain management system.

And if gene sequencing equipment can today translate one billion sequences every few hours (at an estimated cost of $20,000) but the technology is doubling year year, this implies we will be able to translate one trillion genes an hour by 2020. If this comes to pass, sequencing your genome will not only take minutes it will cost pennies on the dollar. Such a change could radically transform how we treat disease and will have profound implications for both the health care and the pharmaceutical industries.

A million, a billion and a trillion might not seem that different (perhaps because they rhyme) but here’s one way to think of the change coming our way:

One million seconds was 12 days ago;
One billion seconds was 32 years ago;
One trillion seconds takes us back to the year 30,000 B.C.

My advice? Buckle up because your future is about to expand in a million, a billion and a trillion different directions.

Rising Life Expectancies Require Unlearning

My focus on unlearning has been borne from my work as a professional futurist. As I explain in this video, the future is changing so fast that as a people and society we must constantly change our worldview. To this end, the Wharton School of Business recently published an formative and insightful article entitled So You Want to Live to 100? More of Us Will, and Here is What Life Might Look Like.

Among the key findings:

1. Governments will need to impose radical changes in public policy.
2. Older workers will increasingly be managed by younger supervisors.
3. There will be a growth in jobs that require only 15, 20 or 25 hours of work a week.
4. The 21st century may be a “century of redistribution of work” in which individuals will will combine work, education, leisure and child-rearing (and parent care) in varying amounts at different times in their lives.

In each case, the change will require unlearning. My question to you is this: Are you and your organization ready?

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Unlearning the Future

Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss.

You shouldn’t.

Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a day. The company had developed an impressive technology but it hardly seemed transformative. Ten years of exponential growth later, though, and Google has changed everything from how people get their news and entertainment to how politics and health care are practiced.

Wikipedia offers yet another example of exponential growth. Who amongst us could have imagined in 2001 when the first 100 Wikipedia entries were placed on the Internet that within eight years the site--which relies on free labor no less--would become the most widely used information source in the world?

It would be easy to believe that Google and Wikipedia are unique and, as such, represent one-time anomalies. They are not.

Ironically, if you type the word “exponential” into Google, the first search item that comes up is an entry from Wikipedia. If one then clicks on the list of “exponential topics” at the bottom of the definition there is an odd looking word: zenzizenzizenzic.

The term is defined as a number to its eighth power. Thus, the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 is 2(8)--or 256.

Now, zenzizenzizenzic might seem like a rather innocent concept but recall that Google and Wikipedia both experienced zenzizenzizenzic-like growth and, in the process, transformed a number of industries; and, in the coming decade, so too will a number of other emerging technologies.

Consider, for example, that Intel Corporation recently announced it had successfully doubled--to 2 billion--the number of transistors it has crammed onto its next-generation computer chip.

The real world manifestation of Intel’s zenzizenzizenzic is that we can now purchase a computer over 200 times more powerful than the one we bought a 1997--at one-third the cost.

Moreover, because the semiconductor industry will likely continue its little trick of effectively doubling the number of transistors it can place on a computer chip every 18 months this implies that by 2020 the zenzizenzizenzic of today’s 2 billion transistor could morph into a 500 billion transistor computer chip. Try wrapping your mind around what such super-powerful computers might enable us to do and achieve.

Exponential growth is not simply limited to the computer and Internet industries. Data storage, bandwidth, gene sequencing and even the growth of synthetic diamonds are all expected to undergo zenzizenzizenzic progression in the coming decade.

In fact these fields are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to Gartner Research, the field rapid prototype manufacturing (i.e. machines which can physically print objects) will grow more than 100-fold. And in the past year, researchers in Finland have replaced a patient’s lower jaw with synthetic material growth from stem cells; researchers at the University of Minnesota have successfully demonstrated that they could grow a beating rat heart from living cells; and self-driven robotic cars have successfully navigated through an urban environment. Progress in these fields will not stop.

It has been said that the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. This is true and if one studies the amazing technological progress occurring in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics and then applies the power of zenzizenzizenzic to these advances, it is easy to understand how it would behoove us all to reconsider Carl Sagan’s sage advice and begin preparing ourselves for a great deal of unlearning. 

Unlearning the Toaster

At first appearances, the idea of a portable toaster may seem absurd and, perhaps, it is. But is there any reason a toaster can't look like the one in the picture to the right?

One of the real benefits of unlearning is that it can help spur creavity and innovation. For example, what if the purpose of the portable toaster is not to allow users to have toast-on-the-go, but instead to help customers remove the bulky toaster from the kitchen counter. Or what if the product is designed for the elderly widow who likes a single piece of toast only once a week? Or what if the device doesn't even end up being used by people to make toast and, instead, is used by urban dwellers who can't easily start a fire but who want to quickly roast a marshmellow to curb their craving for a Smore?

Unlearn Your Mindset

"Much of what we think we believe, we learned as a child, and to lead a fuller life you should never stop questioning what you do and looking at things in a new light." -- Ellen Langer

Until yesterday, I had no idea who Ellen Langer was. Now, I find myself wanting to purchase her forthcoming book, CounterClockwise, along with some of her other books, including Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning.

My fascination began when I stumbled across this article in Newsweek entitled "Just Say No to Aging,” which profiles her new book. Two items, in particular, caught my attention. First, a group of men were asked to imagine that it was 20 years earlier. This, however, was no ordinary exercise. The men were actually taken to isolated retro-fitted New England hotel and instructed to act as though they were two decades younger. (Party like it’s 1989!)

Langer’s findings were amazing. After just one week the men in the experimental group had more joint flexibility, increased dexerity and less arthritis in their hands. In other words, just by thinking they were younger they felt younger!

This is not an isolated example. According to this article, Langer conducted a similar experiment with hotel chambermaids. The maids were separated into two groups. Both groups did the exact same work only one group believed they were getting exercise with their work while the other group didn’t. The group that thought they were exercising not only lost more weight, they also experienced a drop in blood pressure.

Both studies strongly suggest that people need only “unlearn” their mindset in order to experience real changes in their health. Or, as I wrote in my book, Jump the Curve, people need to ”stop acting their age.”

Related posts on unlearning:

Unlearning Disease
Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Need to Unlearn?
Is the Health Care Industry prepared to Unlearn?
Examples of Unexponential Thinking

Unlearning Your Age

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article describing how appliance manufacturers are now doing a better job of designing products for aging baby boomers. One strategy they employ is to make their younger engineers wear "aging suits" to help them empathize with and better understand how more elderly users might actually experience a product. To this end, the younger workers tape up their fingers to simulate arthritis; stick cotton balls in their ears to lessen their hearing; and wear thick glasses to affect impaired vision. All-in-all the strategy seems to have delivered some impressive results and it speaks to the benefits of unlearning one's age.

Unlearning Death

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin -- then one of the world's brightest men and most accomplished scientists -- declared heavier than air machines to be "impossible."

He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.

A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he theorized that aging is a  disease and should be treated as such.

The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord Kelvin's reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even declared that de Grey's idea was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community."

Well, according to this article in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within scientific circles.

To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey's goal of ending again but, as I have written before, I'd encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely. For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many ideas which it now holds as dear.

In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of "death as an inevitability" could make other past historic paradigm shifts -- such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the universe (an idea for which Aristarchus was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin's theory of evolution -- look like child's play.

Unlearn Genetic Nihilism

WebMD has interesting article suggesting our behavior can influence how are genes act. According to research by Dean Ornish people can change how certain genes perform by making modest adjustments to their life style. Ornish found that by engaging in exercise and eating a more low-fat diet "more than 500 genes changed the way they worked." More specifically, he found that some tumor-suppression genes became more active, while other genes with negative effects -- including some cancer-promoting genes -- were turned off when people engaged in a healthier lifestyle.

I especially liked this quote from Ornish, "People say, 'Oh, it is all in my genes, what can I do?' That's what I call genetic nihilism." Undoubtedly, many people do subscribe to the idea that our genes determine our fate. If, however, Ornish's findings prove to be true, it will dispel that idea and will require people to unlearn the idea that while "genes may be our predisposition, they are not are fate."

Think You're Fat? Think You Know Why? Think Again.

A new study  by researchers at the University of California - San Francisco suggests that a gene responsible for regulating the neurotransmitter serontonin may be why some people can eat the same amount of food as someone else but not gain as much weight. (The neurons apparently send signals to the brain and "instruct" it to burn or store fat.)

If this is true (remember it is only a study so this is not defnitive information), a number of individuals and businesses -- including weight loss businesses -- may need to unlearn whether their suggested strategy for weight loss (be it dieting, exercise or surgery) is, in fact, the best approach.