The point he's making about scientists is that they use today's technology right now and it isn't affecting their concentration. > These days scientists are ne

The point he's making about scientists is that they use today's technology right now and it isn't affecting their concentration. > These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yes there are new technological distractions, but they're not qualitatively different from any other distraction and you deal with them the same way. You and others speculate that people growing up in todays technological world will have their intellectual capacity somehow diminished. He points out that it was ever thus. > But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously. And he goes on to refute some of the basic premises that the "twitter rots your brain" theory is built on. Douglas Adams put it in more general terms. 1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal. 2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it. 3) Anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.