Or am I mixing up a couple of words here? I must admit: I’m pretty confused. I’ve been reading quite a bit about paper vis-à-vis technology. And I honestly cannot tell for sure which one will actually make you smarter or dumber. The fact that I’ve been reading about paper on my Kindle while reading about technology in magazines, obviously hasn’t helped.

The internet is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.

A while ago, I read “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind” by Gary W. Small and Gigi Vorgan. It has this story about a 2008 experiment at UCLA that actually showed people’s brain changing in response to Internet use. Twenty-four volunteers were asked to perform searches on Google after they had been shoved into a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager (MRI). Twelve of them were experienced web surfers, twelve were novices.

The experienced surfers showed much broader brain activity than the novices, especially in some particular area of the brain: the area associated with problem solving and decision making.

Tell me something, were you looking for this blog? Unless you are one of my (worryingly small) circle of family and friends, I doubt that you were. Instead, I suspect that your reading this now has come as almost as much of a surprise to you as my finally getting round to writing it has to me. Not necessarily a major surprise. And, who knows, maybe not even an especially welcome surprise. But something at least a little unpredicted, nonetheless. Which means that, one way or another, you’ve come upon something that you weren’t actually looking for. And that in itself might be something worthy of your interest. Read on

In the eighteenth century the great economist and philosopher Adam Smith invented the mother of all economic models; unlimited interaction between individuals would maximize the profit in the “marketplace”.  Helped by the industrial revolution in the century after, the proof was in the pudding and the man was right. Millions of people were paid more than they ever earned before and the average standard of living started to increase. The founders and owners of large corporations invented the term “social Darwinism” to justify exploitation of their workers.   Read on