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.'"

Comments

If searching stimulates brain activity....

[zach_the_lizard]

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.

No control condition?

[beatsme]

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

Re:No control condition?

[Shrike82]

I was thinking along similar lines, but I'm more inclined to attribute it to the fact that they're first-time Internet users, and that learning how to use a search engine and formulate a good search for the first time is bound to show brain development and "enhanced neural stimulation". Replace "Internet searching" with anything else and introduce it to people who have never done it before and I bet you'll find new brain development and enhanced neural stimulation. It's called "learning" and, shockingly, when people learn new things their brain structure changes.

Space Travel for the common man

[Dareth]

Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!

Re:Doing searches

[bkr1_2k]

I wish my mom and sister would learn this "simple" technique. I always get the call... My first question is always, "did you google it? No? Why don't you try? Hey, look, first response to is an answer to your question. See, that only took 30 seconds and you've been hemming and hawing for the last 2 hours and finally decided to call me."

If you make people think...

[DynaSoar]

... 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.