Cool is overrated, but no one has invented an alternative.

I say this as someone whose coolness quotient is wholly dependent on my knowledge of certain cool things. Beyond that, it sort of drags in the mud.

To boost my cool creds, I’ve been trying to move over fully from Yahoo! to Google mail. Besides better integration between Google services, Gmail is considered way cooler than Yahoo! Mail among the technorati. The problem is I’m having detachment anxiety.

It took me forever to give up Prodigy, CompuServe, Aloha.net and 56k modems, so no surprise: making the transition from Yahoo! to Google has been painful and drawn-out. I find myself flipping between the two, reducing my productivity and confusing myself about how to do one thing or another.

But I’ve got a plan that starts with moving my Yahoo! contacts to Google. Follow along if you are jumping to Gmail, too.

1. Log into your Yahoo! Mail and click on the Import/Export link in the top right of your address book page.

2. Scroll down to the Export options and click on the Yahoo! CVS: Export Now button.

3. Save the cvs file to your desktop. Go your Gmail account, and click on the Contacts link. In the upper right corner, click on Import. Hit Browse, find the cvs file on your desktop and click on Import.

Google will let you know how many of your contacts were imported. All but two of mine did and those were easily fixed for import.

The process wasn’t bad at all. Won’t be too long before I say adieu to Yahoo!

Nicholas Carr writes a provocative article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly that posits, a favorite chichi word around here, that Google is making us stupid.

This isn’t based on any reliable research, other than a University College London study of online habits that notes people on the Internet are ADD. It doesn’t quite say this, but it does find that Web visitors don’t read deeply. Rather, they skip from one information source to another like mejiro in search of the perfect fig.

Carr takes the premise beyond the scientific into the murkiness of the anecdotal by asserting that he and others believe they are losing their ability to read anything lengthy. Journal articles, research papers, long books, Proust — all are tough going now.

If he’s right, this has dire implications for any human activity that requires sustained concentration — advanced math, philosophy, languages, medicine and throwing the round ball into the triangle hole at the Punahou Carnival game booth.

I have an alternate theory, but it requires intellectual rigor to own up to it: Carr and the rest of us are simply getting old. And I happen to have scientific proof of this, at least as it pertains to me. I say “proof,” because it doesn’t take much to convince me I’m on a steep decline.

Brain Age 2, the latest version of the Nintendo DS game, was recently installed on my daughter’s console. Based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age claims to train your brain to stay sharp with 10 minutes daily of word and number games.

At the outset, you go through several exercises to determine your starting brain age. I thought I was pretty good at video games, but still the animated Dr. Kawashima laughed his head off announcing my brain age was 80.

So it may be true that Google is turning our brains into oatmeal. Or it may be that we no longer have the requisite number of brain cells to read more than three paragraphs into a story.

As for those of you who are young and suffering from the same affliction of shallow, peripatetic reading, your head may have already been reprogrammed by Google. Intervention is your only hope.

First one to e-mail me gets a copy of “War and Peace.”