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Is the Internet making us dumber?

David Brooks implied as much a few weeks ago in his New York Times column “The Outsourced Brain,” when he embraced the fact that new technologies and the Internet were doing all our intellectual heavy lifting nowadays:

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

I filed that away in my mental attic at the time, tucking it away between Jeanne Zelasko’s clichés during the World Series and oddball jack-o-lantern designs.

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