Ru Zi Ke Jiao

“We measure intelligence in a certain way now, and maybe the whole nature of intelligence will be changing 10 years from now. It won’t necessarily be how much you can retain, how much your hard drive can hold in your head, but it’ll be the way you can assess information, that you can think critically, that you can synthesize information.” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project

Nicholas Carr, author of the book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google,” was among those surveyed for the report, and said he stands by what he wrote. “But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores,” he said in the Pew report.

He continues, “What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

Sandra Kelly, 3M Corp.’s market research manager and a participant in the study, said she doesn’t think “an adult’s IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything, and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though.”

NASH: The above quotes come from an article entitled: Internet making our brains, different, not dumb I think it’s definitely worth reading, especially if you’re stuck in the wrong age. Hmm, my most loyal readers must be tired of me linking to my “Are you stuck in the wrong age?” post. However, I have many new readers each week and that post is simply too important for today’s young people. Perhaps you should read it again.

One more thing. Dr. Stan Kutcher has an excellent post about how the brain adapts to using our environment and specifically, how using search engines – he focuses on Google, but the results would have to universal – activates a completely new part of our brain. And like everything else we do, the more we use it, the stronger it grows. And vice-versa, thus the old saw: “Use it or lose it.”