About the Program
Could playing video games and watching popular television programs actually make people smarter? That's the question technology writer Steven Johnson addresses in his book, "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter." In it, the author writes that games like Grand Theft Auto and Tetris force players to recognize and interpret complex patterns which in turn develop the cognitive abilities of those playing the games. It is along these same lines that shows like the Apprentice and C.S.I. force viewers to track often complex relationships between characters and predict behavior based on given information.