• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, May 2, 2005

If you get as many legitimate e-mails and as much spam as I do (and aren't really sure which category notes from your wife fall into) you already know that dealing with e-mail is a mind-numbing experience at best. But, now along comes a report from the U.K. "that checking messages or keyboarding temporarily knocks 10 points off a users' intelligence, compared to a loss of only four points when smoking a joint."

One of the U.K. study researchers is quoted as saying, "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness."

The report fails to mention that also unlike hitting the bong, checking e-mail doesn't make you jump around like a school girl when Green Day comes on the radio or consume an entire box of Krispy Kremes while watching the Cartoon Network, but we - like dude - digress.

It is interesting, however - and only goes to prove that the U.K. has indeed become the California of Europe; of all the intelligence-robbing activities one could compare with attending to e-mail, these researchers chose smoking weed. Why not watching your kid play rec soccer, or having dinner with Kevin Ryan, or alphabetically reorganizing your MP3 downloads by genre, or listening to AOL present at a conference? You see, since you stopped paying attention in 10th grade geometry, nearly every activity in adult life takes a toll on your intelligence.

But, let's for a moment stick with the cannabis analogy. For example, reading anything written by Jeff Jarvis is a lot like taking a toke off the blunt: You feel really smart for a while, then wake up the next day and forget not only what you read, but why you ever thought it was "like totally awesome" to begin with.

Trying to explain the new Google ad network is about the same as snacking on two hash brownies; you have it all straight in your mind, but when you go to explain it to the rest of the group (who are at the moment arguing if a particular cloud looks more like the outline of Spain or profile of Tupac) you get stuck somewhere along the lines of "But its like the inventory will, man you know, comes from, uh, crap, what a rush, the uh publisher... or not, maybe from, you know the, stuff they give Google, or not, you know?"

Noted.

Since ganja often makes you kinda silly, it is not a bad time to discuss the future of network TV. For a while, you will laugh your ass off at network bravado, then slowly drift off to sleep reading a David Poltrack apologia: "You can't use these models without looking at qualitative and return-on-investment dimensions, and these all point to the importance of maintaining a strong broadcast network."

Hitting the doobie makes some people a little paranoid, so if you work in the newspaper industry you may want to avoid reading, well, nearly anything having to do with advertising trends. Then, when you recover the next day, you may want to continue skipping the ad trades. It doesn't get any better with the dawn of a new day.

Having a session with chronic often spawns brilliant ideas such as "I know, let's go jump in the fountains in front of the Met!" or "Quick, quick see if 'Rocky Horror' is on cable!" So it is not a bad time to come up with some cool ideas like a behavioral ad network where the advertisers don't have a clue where their ads will run; or gathering a bunch of has-been celebrities to blog about what is right and wrong with the nation, or thinking you can attend an off-limits nationally-covered magazine party and not think it will piss off your parole officer.

The best news of all is that the next time your boss likens your effort to someone "stoned out their minds" you can retort, "Hey at least I don't have my e-mail open all the time... like SOME people!"