Does Using Google Make You Smarter?

John Funk

U.N. Owen Was Him?
Dec 20, 2005
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Does Using Google Make You Smarter?



It turns out that this whole Internet thing might not be rotting your brain after all. In fact, evidence is in that shows using the Internet might actually make you smarter.

A study undertaken by the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles (better known as UCLA) shows that for many people, using the Internet can be the brain's equivalent of a full-body workout.

The study took 24 subjects, half of which were experienced Net-savvy web-crawlers, and the other half of which barely used the Internet at all in their daily lives (yeah, I know, I don't get how that's possible either). When asked to do something passive - reading an e-book off a computer screen - there wasn't any noticeable difference in the brain activity between Group A and Group B.

However, when asked to search for the benefits of eating chocolate, and the best way to travel to the Galápagos Islands, the frequent Internet users experienced twice as much brain activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of their gray matter ... all of which contribute to complex reasoning.

It's a small study, and I think they'd need to obviously try again with a larger sample size (as well as test a wider range of subjects - from what I understand, the subjects were all 50 or older), but hey, evidence is evidence.

So the next time your parents/siblings/significant other/coworkers yell at you to stop spending so much time online, you can turn to them and wittily respond, "But I'm getting smarter. Your puny little temporal lobe is no match for mine." It's the mental equivalent of kicking sand into their face at the beach.

(PopSci [http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/brain-gain])

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BolognaBaloney

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Mar 17, 2009
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This is great, I finally have a great excuse to use when my parents barge in at three in the morning.

"But mom, I'm learning!"
 

Jon Etheridge

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Apr 28, 2009
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It's pretty much like using a giant virtual library when you think about it. Except you don't have that nagging wench in the corner going "shhhh".
 

S.H.A.R.P.

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Mar 4, 2009
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Doesn't it indicate that you have trained certain parts of your brain by having used the internet a lot already? I bet that if there was a similar test executed with paper encyclopaedia's, where the no-internet-group were very proficient with them, while the pro-internet-group never used them, then suddenly the paper encyclopaedia readers were the smarter ones. Perhaps not in the same ways though.
 

mikecoulter

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Dec 27, 2008
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That's quite nice to know. I always think that somehow computers will be the death of me... Electric shock? Death by CD tray to the face? Stay tuned...
 

Erana

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S.H.A.R.P. said:
Doesn't it indicate that you have trained certain parts of your brain by having used the internet a lot already? I bet that if there was a similar test executed with paper encyclopaedia's, where the no-internet-group were very proficient with them, while the pro-internet-group never used them, then suddenly the paper encyclopaedia readers were the smarter ones. Perhaps not in the same ways though.
Which is why I'm really thankful I didn't much start using the internet 'till college- I got to frolic about like a healthy little girl rather than stare at the monitor and use paper references.
 

DeadlyYellow

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Jun 18, 2008
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GodsOneMistake said:
Yay por.... i mean Studying Asian culture for school makes me smarter, ya thats what I was doing
What on Google does not lead to...Asian culture? Or blond culture?
 

Uncompetative

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Jul 2, 2008
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I find it best to search through a filter. That is why my homepage is the Wikipedia. The footnotes then lead to authoritative sources that have been read by someone else first, passed some quality bar (no matter how low) and tend to be free from advertising. Other forums on specific areas of interest give me query-leads which I can then hunt for using Google. However, I am prepared to use Google Similar Images, Cuil, Bing (for video), Amazon (to sneak a look at books with "Look inside") and Wolfram|Alpha.

Basically, I have just been a hypertextual bookworm for the last few years. I save most of what I find as I regard the web as ephemeral.

Hence: 2000+ .pdfs
 

John Funk

U.N. Owen Was Him?
Dec 20, 2005
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S.H.A.R.P. said:
Doesn't it indicate that you have trained certain parts of your brain by having used the internet a lot already? I bet that if there was a similar test executed with paper encyclopaedia's, where the no-internet-group were very proficient with them, while the pro-internet-group never used them, then suddenly the paper encyclopaedia readers were the smarter ones. Perhaps not in the same ways though.
From what I understand, this wasn't as if they were being judged on how quickly they could find things. It's that MRI scans showed simply higher brain activity in complex thinking cores.
 

riskroWe

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May 12, 2009
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To paraphrase that other article: A collective "duh" resounds from the internet community.
 

spuddyt

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Nov 22, 2008
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I call bull on this research - there are so many extraenous variables its not funny, you are comparing people who are extremely familiar with a particular task to perform that task and then directly compare them with people who don't do that, how is that telling you anything??
Far better to get them to do a task which is neutral between the two groups, neither one should have more experience at it.
 

hypothetical fact

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Oct 8, 2008
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It might just be my eyes at 1am but this news is flawed.
The group that is experienced with the internet is thinking of search methods and search engines to use, along with any specific websites they may recall to help them. The noob group is thinking: "Internet please give me an answer because I don't know what I'm doing."
Group A knows what they are doing but they could fail any number of aptitude tests; group B could be a bunch of MENSA brand prodigies but when they don't know what they are doing, they don't know what they are doing.

Nicholas Carr shares my opinion that google is making us into a bunch of chimps with no attention span for anything: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google