India, June 6 -- Biju Dominic keeps coming back to the same idea: we're becoming less curious.

His analogy is simple. Think of a librarian anywhere in the world-they had the most access to knowledge but the librarian was rarely the most well-read person in the room. Someone from outside would come in andthan the person with easy access to the books.

Dominic, author of the recently published Microstimuli and chief evangelist at Fractal Analytics, calls this the 'Librarian's Paradox'. Abundance, he says, breeds a peculiar kind of intellectual complacency.

For generations, you had to forage through a library to acquire knowledge, he says. Even when the internet became all-pervasive, that friction remained. You still had to know how to sea...