According to an article in "Trends in Genetics," a Stanford
biochemist studied thousands of brains and things and concluded that
humans were becoming measurably dumber.
Hang on a second. Let me turn down the TV. There's a sit-com on.
It's about fake straights and gays thrown together as roommates.
Watching TV and issuing shout-outs to the public about nutty stuff
is part of my job.
That's better. I changed channels to a show about the likable
homicidal maniac.
Getting back to the article, and premise, about a dumber state of
things, a link with an expanding social media and an elevated state
of dopiness is drawn by some.
How smart do you have to be to spread hate and anger anonymously
on the Internet?
According to Nielsen, the rating organization, the average person
visits 2,500 web pages a month and spends less than one minute on
each.
One moment, please. Incoming from a smartphone: Somebody I hardly
know asks how am I. I am fine.
Getting back to the possible contributing elements of encroaching
dumbness, another study broke into three categories the
communications of people who spent seven hours a month on Facebook:
conversational material, pass-along issues, pointless babble.
Pointless babble accounted for 40 percent of what transpired on
this social media outlet.
Hold, please: Lots of information is at our fingertips.
One Sunday newspaper can contain more information than somebody
living 100 years ago could attain in a lifetime.
But intelligence is more than the retention of facts. Goofball
actors can recall world-wide events that transpired on every day of
their lives but might need help in forming a complete sentence.
Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man knew everything, but needed assistance
in crossing a busy street.
True, SpellCheck is easy on the brain.
True, Wikipedia often comes close.
But a quest for knowledge that can lead to a bettered mankind has
to be an eternal human condition. We can't be getting dumber.
Hang on a second.
There's an update on the head of the CIA who was caught in an
affair. Seems he sent more incriminating emails than was first
imagined. Just typed in some pretty raunchy stuff and hit "send" as
though the remnants of his desires would soon vanish, poof, like
that, into thin air.
Now, where were we?
