25 Smarter Than You Think Quotes from the Clive Thompson Novel

We have all wondered if the changes in the world have made us smarter or dumber as humans, and these Smarter Than You Think quotes hold the answers, according to author Clive Thompson.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better is a novel written by author Clive Thompson and published by Penguin Press in 2013.

The book seeks to answer the question of whether or not technology has dumbed us down or made us more intelligent as a society.

Thompson strongly feels that technology has, in fact, made us smarter, and through stories from different characters, he gives examples of technology helping people become smarter.

He strives to prove that technology has allowed us to learn new ideas and concepts with a global outlook while still holding on to the best ideas from the past.

Take a look at these Smarter Than You Think quotes to learn more about how technology has impacted how we think.

The Best Smarter Than You Think Quotes 

Here are some of the best Smarter Than You Think quotes. 

1. “We’re social creatures, so we think socially.” — Clive Thompson 

2. “We know that reading changes the way we think.” — Clive Thompson 

3. “Writing about things has other salutary cognitive effects.” — Clive Thompson 

4. “Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.” — Clive Thompson 

5. “Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions.” — Clive Thompson 

6. “But the real intellectual action often takes place in the comments.” — Clive Thompson 

7. “But the Internet and modern digital tools have been particularly romanticized.” — Clive Thompson 

8. “When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.” — Clive Thompson 

9. “Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.” — Clive Thompson 

10. “Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas.” — Clive Thompson 

Thought-Provoking Smarter Than You Think Quotes 

Check out these thought-provoking Smarter Than You Think quotes. 

11. “And e-mail has indeed become one of the banes of corporate existence.” — Clive Thompson 

12. “In 1981, a gigabyte of memory cost roughly three hundred thousand dollars, but now it can be had for pennies.” — Clive Thompson 

13. “Readers are already streaming “highlights” of what they’re reading onto services like Goodreads, Findings, or Amazon’s Kindle.” — Clive Thompson 

14. “Others have found that kids who message a lot appear to have slightly better spelling and literacy abilities than those who don’t.” — Clive Thompson 

15. “When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away, and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.” — Clive Thompson 

16. “One of the great challenges of today’s digital thinking tools is knowing when not to use them, when to rely on the powers of older and slower technologies, like paper and books.” — Clive Thompson 

17. “Why would the same ideas occur to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment.” — Clive Thompson 

More Smarter Than You Think Quotes 

Take a look at some more Smarter Than You Think quotes. 

18. “If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you’ve got to linger over it.” — Clive Thompson 

19. “The reason millions of people collaborate on playing video games is that millions of people can now collaborate on anything.” — Clive Thompson

20. “Although we talk about someone’s having a mind like a steel trap, memory for facts is quite specific to our obsessions, as this research shows.” — Clive Thompson

21. “As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.” — Clive Thompson 

22. “Consider these current rough estimates: Each day, we compose 154 billion e-mails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog posts and 1.3 million blog comments on WordPress alone.” — Clive Thompson 

23. “Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid.” — Clive Thompson 

24. “But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.” — Clive Thompson

25. “While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had found interesting—and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I’d only lightly skimmed myself.” — Clive Thompson

About the Author of Smarter Than You Think

Clive Thompson grew up in the 1970s and ’80s and became enamored with “home computers” as they became more popular.

He took that passion and made a career that started after attending the University of Toronto.

Today, he is an award-winning technology writer for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and the Smithsonian Magazine.

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