Life Lisa notices the brain freeze which also seems to have infected me lately. Another under-graduate reference, but during a course on Information and Society, the lecturer predicted that as computers and specifically the internet became more sophisticated (this was in 1995) people would begin to rely less on their own brain capacity and instead on the systems around them. In effect, people would stop retaining information because it would instantaneously be available anyway.
Which is of course exactly what's happened. Everyone who uses the internet for research is effectively a librarian, doing the very subject searches which information specialists used to train years for (and I did). I don't imagine the brain drain will stop soon either. Within a few years, everyone'll be able to afford a PDA (or similar) and have the Wikipedia (or similar) in their pocket ready to answer any or all questions.
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