Cell phones make kids faster, dumber

[Ann Burlingham]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Dennis Baron<debaron at illinois.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dennis Baron <debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU>
> Subject:      Cell phones make kids faster, dumber
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There's a new post on the Web of Language:  Cell phones make kids
> faster, dumber
>
> Last year the Librarian of Congress warned that texting was
> responsible for a drastic decline in American sentences, but that
> opinion wasn't backed up by any scientific evidence. Now, a team of
> Australian psychologists has come a step closer to proving that mobile
> phones are destroying our ability to think. The researchers show that
> children who use mobile phones respond to higher-level cognitive tasks
> faster, but less accurately, than those who don't.

I expect it will even out in the long run - as we become stupider (and
don't we, with every generation?), we won't have the capacity to
continue making machines smart enough to take up the slack, and the
pendulum will swing back, right?

Or not, and the machines will take over. Wait, I saw that movie....

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