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Oct 15 2008 9:55AM EDT

Google Making Us Smarter. Or Maybe Dumber. No, Wait --

Kevin Maney's head is spinning: There's this scene in Woody Allen's movie Sleeper, where Allen's character wakes up, Rip van Winkle-like, far into the future -- and asks for health food like wheat germ. Two scientists wonders why Allen doesn't ask for the foods proven by then to be TRULY healthy. 


"You mean there was no deep fat?" asks one scientist. "No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?"

"Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true," the other replies.

This is how I'm feeling about Google.

Just this summer, tech provocateur Nicholas Carr published a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic,titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" His answer, as you can imagine, is yes -- much the way engines have made the general population weaker because we all don't have to regularly till the fields and carry water.

But now there's this other study that says that searching the Web on Google actually increases brain activity, and can help stimulate the minds of people middle-aged and older, staving off dementia. 

Maybe Google makes young people dumber and older people smarter. 


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