There may be those that think Twitter and other social media are part of a general ‘dumbing down’ of society, yet the emerging evidence suggests that social media are making people smarter.

Professor Andrew Jackson, of the Theoretical Ecology Group at TCD, and his PhD student, Luke McNally, have devised ingenious methods of testing whether increasing social interactions by media like Twitter, makes us smarter.

They created ‘digital brains’ that played games that replicated how people interact in society, over and over again, for a period of time that equated to 50,000 human generations. The results were fascinating.

LISTEN: Interview with Andrew Jackson

Broadcast on Science Spinning on 103.2 Dublin City FM on 16-04-2012

READ: The article below appeared in The Sunday Times on 12-04-2012