Your Brain on Google - ChronicleReview.com. Is Google Making Us Smarter? -- Brain Function -- InformationWee. UCLA researchers report that searching the Internet may help improve brain function. Over the summer, technology writer Nicholas Carr wrote an article for The Atlantic that asked, "Is Google Making Us Stupid? " Amid anecdotes about people who believe that the information consumption paradigm enforced by the Internet promotes shallow thoughts over deep ruminations, Carr conceded, "We still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.
" Now one such study suggests that searching the Internet may help improve brain function. The study, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the American Journal Of Geriatric Psychiatry, is the work of Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, Teena D. Moody, Ph.D., a senior research associate at UCLA's Semel Institute, and Susan Y. Carr's concern about the impact of the Internet on the way we think isn't misplaced. Study finds that searching the Internet increases brain function. By Rachel ChampeauOctober 14, 2008Category: Health Sciences, Research UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function. The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, is currently in press at the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and will appear in an upcoming issue.
"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults," said principal investigator Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA who holds UCLA's Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging. Internet searches revealed a major difference between the two groups. Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine. Illustration by Guy Billout "Dave, stop.
Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits.
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. Also see: Where does it end? The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love G.
Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Emily Yoffe is a contributing editor at the Atlantic. We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain.
In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love G. Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble.
Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner.
" We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned. Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. Dictionnaire - Dictionnaire, Recherche, Localisateurs. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex - sex - 16.
Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait. The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex. The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. "This is the most robust measure so far of cerebral differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects," she says. Previous studies have also shown differences in brain architecture and activity between gay and straight people, but most relied on people's responses to sexuality driven cues that could have been learned, such as rating the attractiveness of male or female faces.
Brain symmetry To get round this, Savic and her colleague, Per Lindström, chose to measure brain parameters likely to have been fixed at birth. Depression link.