There is nothing retro about the rest of his life. When he is not on his PlayStation, Joe is online with his friends, playing games, swapping music and texting them on the phone. “I hate it when people say, ‘Oh read a book’,” he groans. “Why is reading a book better than playing a game? Lots of books are rubbish.”

Joe, in other words, is a typically lazy know-nothing teenager. He would rather engage in mindless pursuits than develop his imagination and intelligence. But what if his high-speed, high-tech multitasking is helping him to develop skills his parents never had? Could his idle pastimes be boosting his brainpower?

It is a shocking idea for critics of our dumbed-down culture. The conventional wisdom is that we are raising a generation of pasty-faced ignoramuses living out their lives in the flickering glare of television screens and computer monitors. Parents are horrified by the banality of reality television, the violence of video games such as Grand Theft Auto and the easy click to pornography on the internet.

Hold the panic. A new book by the cultural critic Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You, is causing a stir in America with its surprising message: mass culture is making people cleverer.
Johnson calls this counterintuitive trend the Sleeper Curve after the Woody Allen film Sleeper, in which a man wakes up 200 years in the future to discover that theories about what’s good and bad in nutrition have been turned on their head.

Scientist A: Has he asked for anything special?

Scientist B: Yes, this morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk”.

Scientist A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.

Scientist B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?

Scientist A: Those were thought to be unhealthy.

“For decades,” Johnson writes, “we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ‘masses’ want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.”

Whether or not our knowledge of Charles Dickens and George Eliot is tailing off, it is evident that non-bookish parts of our brains are being used as never before. Johnson sees limitless opportunities opening up for complex problem-solving based on systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition and mastery of spatial geometry.

Or, as Joe would put it: “I think playing games or messing about on the computer is much more challenging than watching TV or reading most books. If you are playing San Andreas [the latest in the controversial Grand Theft Auto series] you have to remember so much. It’s like learning to get around in a new city. And loads of games have puzzles and other challenges in them. It’s not just about shooting people.”