What cognitive skills are for (or, is the Internet making us dumber?)

(Click on the image above to play with the “giga­pan” NASA  built using 36,000 “self­ies”)

NASA Releas­es Earth Day ‘Glob­al Self­ie’ Mosa­ic (press release):

“For Earth Day this year, NASA invit­ed peo­ple around the world to step out­side to take a “self­ie” and share it with the world on social media. NASA released Thurs­day a new view of our home plan­et cre­at­ed entire­ly from those pho­tos…The “Glob­al Self­ie” mosa­ic was built using more than 36,000 indi­vid­ual pho­tographs drawn from the more than 50,000 images tagged #Glob­al­Selfie and post­ed on or around Earth Day, April 22, on Twit­ter, Insta­gram, Face­book, Google+ and Flickr. The project was designed to encour­age envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and rec­og­nize the agen­cy’s ongo­ing work to pro­tect our home planet.”

Thank you very much, NASA, for such a beau­ti­ful dis­play of human cog­ni­tion. Nope, the Inter­net is not mak­ing us dumb­er.

Relat­ed articles:

• What are cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, and how to boost them?
• Is the Inter­net mak­ing us dumb­er? (Nope, just different)