Do meetings make us stupid?

This question bears pondering. An article on yahoo seeks to make it a rhetorical question in an article entitled, Meetings Make You Stupid. While concluding that "some meetings are necessary as a means of getting information out to a large number of people at once," it makes a strong argument in favor of allowing educated, well-trained, motivated, and intelligent people to work alone for better creativity and results. What prompted this question was a MSNBC article (Meetings make us dumber, study shows Brainstorming sessions backfire when group thinking clouds decisions) that reported on the results of a study in which social scientists "exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others".