“Of course, everything can’t speed up,” says David Levy, a professor at the Information School of the University of Washington. “You can’t speed up the time needed to be intimate with one another. Thinking is not an activity you can speed up. It needs time to muse and reflect, and some of the things we need to do in order to think, like walk, or read deeply, or even take naps, simply don’t fit into this globalizing idea of more-faster-better.”
In fact, being “always on” may look good in a society that glorifies busyness, but it’s a killer intellectually. Last year, researchers at King’s College Institute of Psychiatry in London reported the constant use of e-mail and other social media – what they called “unchecked infomania” – led to a temporary 10-point drop in the IQ of the study’s participants. That was twice as much as pot smokers.
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