Fun way to get smarter

What is the easiest and fun way to become smarter? Watching dumb (Jim Carrey in the movie Dumb and Dumber) or retarded (Ben Stiller in the more recent Tropic of Thunder) guys may help us feel a little smarter inside.

But I would recommend getting on the Internet.

Wait a minute. Don’t I have to be smart to use the computer?

So that brings up the question:
Is it because we are smart, that we are computer savvy or is it because we are computer-literate that we are becoming smarter?

If you go by this recent article in Newsweek, you tend to believe the latter. Though it would be a stretch to suggest that the next change in human evolution will be decided by the sea of digital networks that we swim in and out every day, it is hard to deny its impact on our brain.

Today, as soon as we wake up, even before we go to the washroom to relieve ourselves, it is more likely that we will be checking for any missed calls / text messages in the in-box of our cell phones or e-mails on our PCs/laptops!

And from that moment on and until we hit our beds again at the end of the day/night we are subjected to a constant stream of information through any number of digital devices that we use.
Subject to such barrage we exercise a choice to accept, reject or postpone any piece of information for later action.

Take for instance an activity like making a search on the Internet which has become routine now-a-days.  As this article points out, we need to make minute adjustments in our decision making as we make our search on the Internet.

In fact I was making a search on the Internet for results that supports/denies my claim that going digital makes us smarter, I made a search with the terms “ways to get smarter” I came back with thousands of pages that are supposedly a match to my request.

Out of many I chose this page that I believe was a close match to what I had in mind. Incidentally this page doesn’t list using computers as a way to become smarter.

But what if

• I had chosen a different page out of many search results that were spewed out.
• Or I had chosen different terms(words) to type in before I hit enter
• Or limit the results to my local region.
• Or change my search engine to Yahoo, MSN or ASK instead of Google

My results would have been different. So I try with different inputs.

As a result, I tend to become a little smarter.