In Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" the question of human intelligence is challenged by our dependence on the Internet. His article inspired much research on the topic and some very interesting studies have been produced because of Carr's observations. An argument has been made that having information at our fingertips is not necessarily making us dumb, it is just making our brains process information differently. According to Science, we're not necessarily losing our ability to remember things, but the internet is changing how we remember. People are recalling information less, but instead they can remember where to find the forgotten information. Instead of knowing the answer to something right off the bat, a person is more likely to think about which key words they would type into Google to find the answer most efficiently instead of racking their brain to think of the answer themselves.
This was explored further in a study UCLA performed
on how Internet usage affected
memory and cognition. Participants of the study were
split into a group of subjects between 55 and 76 years of age with either high or low Internet experience. An MRI scan was taken to
see how their brains worked when reading books or searching the web. The more proficient Internet users showed an increase of brain activity,
with more advanced decision-making skills and complex reasoning, while the inexperienced Internet users had less brain activity.
I thought this would be an interesting addition to the Carr essay and further add to the complication of how our brains have been affected by the invention of computers.
Gracie, thanks for the link to the Science publication (which has a great list of related reading links, by the way). I find the authors' idea of "external" or "transactive" memory very like McLuhan's idea of technology as an extension of human capacities.
ReplyDeleteYour post also reminds me of something that happened here on the Cal campus--a few years ago, a new class on web architecture was offered in the iSchool, and the instructors initially planned to spend only a few days on the basic structure of computer storage before moving on to the more complicated stuff. However, to their surprise, they quickly discovered that most students had no idea that their computers used a file directory structure to manage memory, perhaps because everyone these days just uses the search or find functions on their computers and the Web?