In 2015, Brian Peterson and his wife, Vanessa, had just moved to Santa Ana, California. Outside the couple’s apartment, a homeless man was often yelling on the street corner.

One day, Peterson was relaxing in his living room, reading the book Love Does, about the power of love in action, when his quiet was disturbed by the homeless man. Inspired by the book’s compassionate message. Peterson made an unexpected decision: He was going to go outside and introduce himself.

In that first conversation, Peterson learned that the man’s name was Matt Faris. He’d moved to Southern California from Kentucky to pursue a career in music, but he soon fell on hard times and ended up living on the street for more than a decade.

“It was the weirdest thing to me,” Peterson recalled later. “I saw beauty on the face of a man who hadn’t shaved in probably a year. But his story, the life inside of him, inspired me.” And even though Peterson hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in about eight years, he found himself asking if he could pain Faris’s portrait. Faris said yes.

Peterson’s connection with Faris led him to form Faces of Santa Ana, a nonprofit organization focused on befriending and painting portraits of members of the community who are unhoused Peterson sells the portrait for a few thousand dollars, putting half of the profits into what he calls a “love account” for his model. He then helps people use the money to get back on their feet.

Many of Peterson’s new friends use the donations to secure immediate necessities — medical care hotel rooms, food. Faris used the funds from his portrait to record an album, fulfilling his musical dreams. When the check was delivered, “they both wept in my arms,” Peterson recalls.

Having painted 41 of these portraits himself, he’s discovered that the buyers tend to connect to the story of the person in the painting, finding similarities and often friendship with someone they might have otherwise overlooked or stereotyped.

“People often tell me, ‘I was the one that would cross the street. But I see homeless people differently now,’” Peterson says. “I didn’t know that would happen.”

It’s a question that’s bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting sillier and dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal?

The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr’s recent The Shallows, asks what the Internet is doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, Mr. Carr addresses the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country’s poor educational performance when compared with other countries. In reading, mathematics and science, American 15-year-olds suffer in the lower half of the rankings for the 30 wealthiest countries.

But things are rarely as they seem.   E-books barely existed a decade ago, but have exploded in popularity since Amazon introduced its Kindle a few years back. E-books are now outselling hardcovers. Perhaps we are witnessing not a decline in book reading but a renaissance. The irony is that had computers been invented before books we would now.be anxious about the loss of multi-media, multi-tasking, computer-gaming skills as our children wasted their time burying themselves in single topic paper books.

“There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” says Daniel Simons, a psychologist at Union College, New York.

The danger, if there is one, is that the easy, on-demand access to lots of information from the Internet may delude us into mistaking the data we download for genuine wisdom worth acting upon. Only fools would venture into such a forest of information with anything less than their eyes wide open and their brains fully engaged .Fortunately，there are fewer fools around than some of the scaremongers(散布谣言者)like to think.