Don't Read This Blog Post

Google is making us stoopid, after all. This, from a British study:

Evidence shows technology which requires a short attention span - such as Twitter and short YouTube clips - is bad for our brains.

On the Internet, that leaves ... not much at all. Including this blog post. Click away! Save your brains! What's left of them, anyway.

Truly, though, some of this study doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The big takeaway is that Facebook is actually good for your brain, because it augments your working memory -- remembering information and using it -- while sites like Twitter and YouTube corrode your synapses and render you mind incapable of digesting anything more than an amuse-bouche of pixels and Flash. Here's Dr. Tracy Alloway:

"Twitter can cause harm because it produces a stream of information every second with no opportunity to process or manipulate that information."

No opportunity to process that information? Is that smart-person-speak for read? Because I can read Twitter pretty well, even after I've watched a YouTube video. For those uninitiated in Twitter, it's not like glimpsing at a rapidly changing deluge of binary code. It actually looks quite a bit like Facebook's homepage.

As for "no opportunity to...manipulate that information," this seems like a misunderstanding of Twitter, which lets readers respond to messages and "Re-Tweet" or copy other peoples' words. In fact, the write-up of this report on Mashable, a technology news site, was Tweeted 1429 times. Working memory lives!

So look: End snark. To me the most significant thing to come out of the study is not that Twitter is bad for you, but that the psychological study actually used a Facebook-based program to improve working memory for slow-learning students aged 11-14. The real message here should not be that Google, Twitter, and YouTube are bad for our brains, but that it's actually possible to design educational programs with popular websites that improve our working memory and even raise our IQ. Everything bad iz good 4 u, etc.