The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb.

We think that even English professors should respect the difference between correlation and causation: just because ignorance of big lakes and oratorios got worse when the digital age dawned doesn't mean that the latter caused the former. To establish that, you need data. Alas, there isn't much. The ideal experiment is hard to pull off: to study the effect of digital technology on cognitive processing in a rigorous way, you must randomly assign groups of young people to use it a lot, a little or not at all, then follow them for years. As one 19-year-old of our acquaintance said about the chances of getting teens to volunteer for the "not at all" group, "Are you out of your [deleted] mind?"

What we do know about is multitasking: it impairs performance in the moment. If, say, you talk on a cell phone while driving, you have more trouble keeping your car within its lane and reacting to threats, Just reported earlier this year. "Multitasking forces the brain to share processing resources," he says, "so even if the tasks don't use the same regions [talking and driving do not], there is some shared infrastructure that gets overloaded." Chronic multitasking —texting and listening to your iPod and updating your Facebook page while studying for your exam on the Italian Renaissance—might also impair learning, as a 2006 study suggested. Scientists at UCLA led by Russell Poldrack scanned the brains of adults ages 18 to 45 while they learned to interpret symbols on flashcards either in silence or while also counting high-pitched beeps they heard. The volunteers learned to interpret the cards even with the distracting beeps, but when they were asked about the cards afterward, the multitaskers did worse. "Multitasking adversely affects how you learn," Poldrack said at the time. "Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily." Difficult tasks, such as learning calculus or reading "War and Peace," will be particularly adversely affected by multitasking, says psychologist David Meyer of the University of Michigan: "When the tasks are at all challenging, there is a big drop in performance with multitasking. What kids are doing is learning to be skillful at a superficial level."

A lab experiment with cards and beeps is not real life, however. Some scientists suspect that the brain can be trained to multitask, just as it can learn to hit a fastball or memorize the Aeneid. In an unpublished study, Clifford Nass of Stanford and his student Eyal Ophir find that multitaskers do let in a great deal more information, which is otherwise distracting and attention-depleting. But avid multitaskers "seem able to hold more information in short-term memory, and keep it neatly separated into what they need and what they don't," says Nass. "The high multitaskers don't ignore [all the incoming signals], but are able to immediately throw out the irrelevant stuff." They have some kind of compensatory mechanism to override the distractions and process the relevant information effectively.

Even videogames might have cognitive benefits, beyond the hand-eye coordination and spatial skills some foster. In his 2005 book "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson argued that fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons are cognitively demanding, requiring players to build "elaborate fantasy narratives—all by rolling twenty-sided dice and consulting bewildering charts that accounted for a staggering number of variables." Players must calculate the effect of various combinations of weapon, opponent and allies "that would leave most kids weeping if you put the same charts on a math quiz," Johnson wrote. They must use deductive reasoning to infer rules as they go, such as the use of various implements, what you need to do to level-up, intermediary goals, who's friend and who's foe. The games challenge you to identify cause and effect—Johnson describes how SimCity taught his 7-year-old nephew that high tax rates in a city's industrial zone can deter manufacturers from relocating there—and to figure out nested goals, such as the need to find the tool to get the weapon to beat the enemy to cross the moat to reach the castle to (phew) save the princess. This is nothing if not hypothesis testing and problem solving, and games such as Final Fantasy exercise it no less than figuring out where cars traveling toward one another from 450 miles apart, one at 50mph and one at 60mph, will meet.

No one knows what kids will do with the cognitive skills they hone rescuing the princess. If they just save more princesses, Bauerlein will be proved right: Gen Y will turn out to be not just the dumbest but also the most self-absorbed and selfish. (It really aggravates him that many Gen-Yers are unapologetic about their ignorance, dismissing the idea that they should have more facts in their heads as a pre-Google and pre-wiki anachronism.) But maybe they'll deploy their minds to engineer an affordable 100mpg car, to discover the difference in the genetic fingerprints of cancers that spread and those that do not, to identify the causes and cures of intolerance and hate. Oddly, Bauerlein acknowledges that "kids these days are just as smart and motivated as ever." If they're also "the dumbest" because they have "more diversions" and because "screen activity trumps old-fashioned reading materials"—well, choices can change, with maturity, with different reward structures, with changes in the world their elders make. Writing off any generation before it's 30 is what's dumb.

© 2008