How the Internet is Actually Making us Cleverer

Therapeutic Thoughts

Ever noticed how much more we know individually now than we used to?

The academic concrete mindset model of how people think, that I remember reading about somewhere as a teenager, and which I swore I would never conform to, seems to me to have been blown wide open.

It might have been mostly true back in those days, but it certainly isn’t now, and that is a very good thing.

In essence it claims we each go through an evolution of learning, until at some age our thoughts become effectively cemented in concrete, and we become incapable of learning any more.

If I remember rightly, that age ranges between late teens and early to mid thirties in most people.

If it was true, then it would imply our collective learning as a species, the evolution of human knowledge, would be somewhat dependent on population demographics.

And perhaps it was, until the internet came along.

I personally was already a mature student by then, in early thirties, with full intention of proving complete non-conformance with the concrete thinking (and even proud) brigade, if not to anyone else, at least to myself.

You can tell it did always stick in my mind, that what seemed to me incredibly arrogant, even gaslighting claim, made by a few who ironically had attained the very same status themselves, and were proud of it…