Is it possible for people to develop skills in more than one style of online learning (searching and reading ebooks); just as many people are bi-lingual at different skill levels?

The Eide Neurolearning Blog presents opposing viewpoints regarding the impact of Google on learning: Google is changing your brain Monday, January 26, 2009.

Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide reflected upon articles from Discover and Atlantic Monthly magazines:

From a brain-based perspective, our bias is that expertise often comes at a cost. As more brain resources get devoted to particular tasks, others shrink and weaken.

My next questions:

How is expertise measured for this statement?

Mastery of a craft is often said to take ten years of focused study, which usually means that the person has selectively filtered out other learning opportunities. Yet, some people do become highly skilled in multi-talents. Are there not numerous shared brain resources between learning tasks?

Could the shrinkage and weakening be decreased by intentional efforts to learn more than one area of expertise?

Would it be more effective to develop high levels of skills in different modalities in order to utilize the brain resources at peak performance, or is it more effective to learn a cluster of similar highly developed tasks?

Follow-up:

Discover: The Brain: How Google is making us smarter by Carl Zimmer 02.15.2009

“Humans are natural born cyber-borgs and the Internet is our “giant extended mind.”

The good Drs. Eide also posted a response in the comments on their blog: The Eide Neurolearning Blog. Thanks!

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