Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Wired sees IQ surge in gamers, credits reality
Friday, May 06, 2005
12:11 PM
I play games. Too much, I'd say. But come on!
Wired attributes a generational increase in IQ to the upcoming generations' affection for computer/video gaming:
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
Am I just dense, or is this an artifact of a test that, in the 50's, was measuring a skill (visiospacial abstract manipulation) which took thinking, which is now just developed by drill?
Does this mean people are getting smarter, any more than measuring typing speed increase with the advent of computers means we are more secretarial? It might indicate a slight increase in small hand manipulation -- just as there may be a slight increase in relationship recognition from gaming.
However, it doesn't perforce make us smarter than people 50 years ago. Let's add a new test -- something less drilled in -- like media criticism, finding inconsistencies in arguments. Then we might have a better test of IQ.
Of course, we'd lose our capacity to compare the 50's to today.
Still, seems like we need a new test. Gaming is what I do when I want to stop thinking.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
TS Eliot, The Rock
...and I didn't even know he played Everquest...
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