Does blogging raise your intelligence?

July 23, 2:56 PMSF Boomers ExaminerSuzanna Stinnett

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“Intelligent” did not describe the bulk of blogs in the beginning, nor does it now. That doesn’t mean the practice and business of blogging isn’t an intelligent one.

As an organism, the Internet has its growing pains, hacking coughs and decaying waste along the roadside. Right alongside all of that, we’ve got community gardens flowering with the best of human impulses. I can’t say at the moment which way the scales are tipping on the time-waster to world-saver continuum. I’ll get back to you on that.

Perspective
As a force for intelligence, what would that look like? How might that work? Well, let’s see. Encountering and learning the ins and outs of online communication can vastly increase neural connections in the brain. That’s intelligence, folks, right there.

I was looking at Eileen Williams’ blog,  “The Feisty Side of Fifty,” and followed some links which led me to discover the work of Francis Benes, a Harvard neuroscientist, in the article "The brain at midlife."  Benes discovered that the myelin sheath, the fatty tube that works sort of like a conductor along the neural pathways in in the brain, increases in effectiveness after the age of fifty. It appears that this may facilitate the integration of emotion and knowledge, which might amount to what we experience as wisdom in our older population. Cool!  Linked to that discovery, I found Suzanna Braun Levine, who wrote the very intelligent “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives.”

Eileen Williams is a presenter, speaking about baby boomers, menopause, and the female transition through the fifties. Her interest in the brain makes her especially intriguing to me. She has a friendly blog with accessible material, which to me amounts to raising our collective intelligence.

I don’t know how it works, but I do know that we’ve arrived at a place where almost anyone can have a voice on the Internet if they so choose. So I stand looking back at the messy birth of blogging with a little salute to that beginning. Maybe we should say thanks to those wacky kids writing all that annoying, misspelled “stuff” on millions of blogs. Maybe that’s the fire and the fertilizer that allows so much to blossom. Do you think that’s possible?

--Suzanna

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