Slashdot Mirror
Doing Internet Searches Boosts Older Brains
Hugh Pickens writes "Medical News Daily reports that researchers have found signs of enhanced neural stimulation in parts of the brain that control decision-making and reasoning when they scanned the brains of middle-aged and older first-time Internet users after only seven days of performing Internet searches. 'We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function,' says Dr Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. At the start of the study, the participants performed Internet searches while the researchers took fMRI scans of their brains to track changes in blood flow in the brain and record subtle changes in neural activity. After practicing searching the Internet for 7 days over 2 weeks at home, the brains of the Internet novices showed activity in the same regions as before, but this time there was new activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, the parts of the brain that are important for working memory and decision-making. 'You can exercise your mind by using the Internet, but it depends on how it's used,' adds Small. 'If you get hooked on gambling or eBay shopping, that may not be positive.'"
First Thought!
"His name was James Damore."
How about searching for pron? Or reading 4chan? What does that do to your brain?
If searching stimulates brain activity, then I ought to have found all the zeros to the Riemann zeta function, cured cancer and AIDS, and devised a way to travel to Mars for 50 cents.
SSC
Without control, it's hard to say whether or not this is just a case of the Hawthorne effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Performing or learning uncommon or new tasks stimulates brain activity.
Up next, how IMPORTANT SCIENCE TYPE PEOPLE claim that thinking causes increased brain activity.
More at eleven...
1 - Click browser's search box.
2 - Type 'P', 'O', 'R', 'N'.
3 - Press 'Enter'.
I can't imagine a scenario where a search stimulates brain acti... Ohhh, ok. I get it now.
All these google searches I am doing on stuff like "Hot Anime Chicks" and "Spongebob Squarepants" are making me smarter and more productive!
to get those damn kids off their lawn, and the internet can help!
I would have gotten first post but I had to Google to find what a "post" was. I think I found one.
Now get off my.... uh, what was I talking about again?
Free Martian Whores!
provides older people the best way to phrase a search, it forces them to come up with
things that are related to their questions. Simple.
I suspect the boost is simply that they're doing something new to them. I doubt that old people who have been online for years would get the same "boost" from just searching.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Or, as some would call it, Google Healthcare Initiative,... ;-)
Of course decision making is going to skyrocket. They've never had so much porn to choose from!
Mushy mush!! Hmmm
Life is not for the lazy.
Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This is your old brain, this is your old brain on internet searches. Any questions, grandpa?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Quaero ergo cogito?
Brilliant Setup-Man to my standup riff.
That of course is what we used to ask each other. Now you can look it up.
That is, except we have now replaced having no hope of knowing who someone is with being too lazy to bother.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I was gonna improve my brain 'n all but I can' remember what I was gonna search for... :-/
Performing any new activity creates stress, because the brain wants to follow its existing neural pathways to accomplish a set of behavior. This is where the phrase "you can't teach an old dog a new trick" expression comes from. After a short time of performing the repetitive behavior, as a way to overcome the stress, the brain will start to create new neural pathways which strengthen with additional repetition. This behavior is not unique to internet searches and it surprises me that it is news-worthy.
Obligatory XKCD..
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
If some computer-related activities can (apparently) change the way the brain works, I wonder if too much of it can have adverse effects. For example I've been using computers for about 30 years now and it's pretty apparent that my brain works quite differently than people who don't. Has this left me at a disadvantage WRT social interaction? I wonder if anyone has done research on that. *searches Google for it* d'oh!
... their brain works more.
That's all there is to it. Age, searching, internet, none of that is relevant other than being conditions under which it can happen. Identical results can be had with kids doing stem completion tasks (E A _ _ _ = E A R T H), college students doing a Stroop task (words naming colors, in that color or a different one), and any brain you can get to sit still and problem solve while stuck inside a tube with horrible noises going on.
TFA is a prime example of someone doing a far too specific test on a general principle and either thinking or pretending to have discovered something. I'm going to go with "pretending" since the new results after practice were seen in the middle and interior frontal gyri, and he claims these results are due to two specific processing tasks, but neglects to mention that the two regions make up more than half the frontal lobes in which there are obviously a great number of things going on, many of which would be occurring during the task, their design is completely incapable of telling the difference between excitatory and inhibitory activation, and there is no word on whether the 'enhanced' neural activity correlated with improved ability to search and/or answer relevant questions, without which one could just as easily make a case that the increased activation was a sign of boredom for having to do the same damn stuff again that they've been doing the past two weeks at home.
Someone needs to do a study and see whether asking hard questions about this stuff of researchers giving talks on it when they clearly don't know enough about what they're doing makes their brains light up in the right places, because if you make people think, their brain works harder. Wouldn't have happened here, because they wouldn't have been forced to answer the questions -- this was just a poster. Anyone can get any poster into one of these conferences as long as it says fMRI on it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
slashdot lowers readers' IQs.
Also, I can't believe no one broke out a Billy Madison quote for this story. e.g. "...and we are all dumber for having heard it. You are awarded zero points and may God have mercy on your soul." "A simple 'no' would have done."
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The neural activity measured in several dead salmon shows a clear reaction to human faces. This proves beyond a doubt the accuracy of studies based on mass EEG tests.
http://sciencestage.com/resources/dead-salmon-responds-portraits-people
first-time Internet users
That must be a strange population, very distinct from normal society. I'm not sure their brain data is relevant to ours.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Those are the keywords for this article.
It sounds like somebody speaking Engrish on the streets of Hong Kong, hawking pirated DVDs of "Hot Nurses 4". "You there, you want Medicine Porn Story!"
How does the author jump to the conclusion that gambling or shopping detriment cognitive thinking? What scientific method did he use to figure that out?
Mars Immigration Department called and said they would take 50. But they will not grant Kanye a travel visa under any circumstances. Probably because the Intergalactic Awards Show is coming up soon and will be hosted there.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Web surfers have found a significant increase in half-decayed jelly-like substances in the cloud. Forensics reveal that these jelly-like substances were once ancient living organisms which died from traumatic acceleration. "Something must have boosted these jellies," says Cloud Detective Henry Dave, "it appears that the older these organisms get, the more suspect they become to being forcibly accelerated away from their shells while doing Internet searches."