Anybody who has their own laboratory at Stanford is probably worth a minute or two of ones time. And then the link breaks. The person who wrote this:
"I would be willing to wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions. We would be surprised by our time-visitor’s memory, broad range of ideas and clear-sighted view of important issues. I would also guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues."...
is Professor Gerald R. Crabtree who runs the eponymous Crabtree Lab.
The quote is from a ten page paper "Our Fragile Intellect" fortunately saved and made available on the web by Professor John C. Lamoreaux at SMU.
Part II of the paper is preprint at the journal Trends in Genetics (Cell Press) available through CiteSeerX and is actually a better place to start to get a taste of the argument. As an added bonus, part II is only three pages long giving one plenty of time to reflect on the role of reading-on-screen in destroying the ability to focus and the dumbing down of the population.
Sorry about the link.
