Earlier this week, UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center released a summary of the results of a study of the effects of Internet searching on brain activity, timed to coincide with the release of a new book, iBrain, by the center’s director, Gary Small. In the study, Small and his team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the blood flows in the brains of 24 middle-aged and elderly volunteers as they either searched the web or read books. When the test subjects read books, they displayed, as would be expected, significant brain activity in “the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.” When the subjects searched the Web, those who already had experience using the Net also displayed considerable activity in the brain regions that “control decision-making and complex reasoning.” (Those without Net experience displayed much less activity in those regions.)
In a great example of the kind of knee-jerk mental response that often characterizes high-speed media, a number of blogs and other media outlets seized on the study as evidence that the Net is “making us smarter.” The findings were portrayed as a counterweight to my recent article in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” which argued that the Internet may be eroding our capacity for deep and concentrated thought. Wired’s Epicenter blog, for instance, brayed, “All that talk about how Google is making us stupid is a bit of a crock, according to a new study from UCLA researchers.” The Epicenter headline: “Google Makes You Smart.”
I’m thrilled, first of all, that brain researchers are beginning to explore the cognitive consequences of Internet use, and I look forward to reading Small’s full report on his study when it is published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. This study, and the many others that are sure to follow, will begin to give us a picture of what happens when our brains adapt to the Web and its distinctive style of transmitting and displaying information. But this picture will necessarily develop slowly and fuzzily. FMRI scans have been a godsend to brain researchers, but the evidence they present is often imprecise. Blood flows in the brain tell us much about what the brain is doing but very little about the quality of thought that results. And when we’re talking about intelligence, it’s the quality of thought that matters.
It’s good to know that older people can, apparently, get some brain exercise through googling – and that that may help them maintain their mental acuity. But to leap from observing that many areas of the brain are activated when searching the Net to the contention that searching the Net makes us more intelligent is like saying that doing pushups improves our carpentry skills. I would guess that you’d see similarly broad brain activity patterns in, say, people playing Pac-man. Does that mean that Pac-man makes us more intelligent? No, it just means that playing Pacman involves many brain circuits.
The Freakonomics blog had a good take on the study:
Small’s team found that experienced web users experience increased stimulation in the regions of their brains that handle complex reasoning and decision making. The activity was more widespread than when the same subjects were reading a book, or when inexperienced web users surfed the internet. In other words, being able to tease out useful information from all the chaff on the internet can be as intellectually demanding a task as completing a crossword puzzle. But is puzzle solving the same kind of “smartness” as the “smartness” that comes from reading a book?
Indeed, I wonder whether the fact that more brain regions are in simultaneous use during web use than during reading doesn’t illustrate (among other things) that concentrated thought becomes more difficult to maintain when reading online than when reading a printed work. Is the relative breadth of brain activity discovered by Small and his colleagues also a map of distraction?
Gary Small wrote a letter to the Atlantic in response to my article. “Nicholas Carr correctly notes that technology is changing our lives and our brains,” he said, continuing:
The average young person spends more than eight hours each day using technology (computers, PDAs, TV, videos), and much less time engaging in direct social contact. Our UCLA brain-scanning studies are showing that such repeated exposure to technology alters brain circuitry, and young developing brains (which usually have the greatest exposure) are the most vulnerable … More than 300,000 years ago, our Neanderthal ancestors discovered handheld tools, which led to the co-evolution of language, goal-directed behavior, social networking, and accelerated development of the frontal lobe, which controls these functions. Today, video-game brain, Internet addiction, and other technology side effects appear to be suppressing frontal-lobe executive skills and our ability to communicate face-to-face. Instead, our brains are developing circuitry for online social networking and are adapting to a new multitasking technology culture.
What Small’s work shows us, above all else, is that Internet use does alter the functioning of our brains, changing how we think and even who we are. We are googling our way, compulsively, to a new mind.