Please Why

A couple months ago, The Atlantic had a feature story titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? It’s about how the internet has changed how we read things. They cite a study:

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

A lot of the article has a sort of “back in my day” tone to it, and I’m not sure if a) we should take any of this seriously, or b) any of it really matters. After all, newspaper articles have always been written in a way that you can get most of the information out of it by skimming. And I don’t think I read books any differently than I used to (although maybe less often, but that’s another issue).

But since Google, I have noticed a distinct difference in how I retain information. That is, I really don’t anymore. Things that I used to commit to memory without even trying, I have to repeatedly look up every time I need it. Maybe that’s just because I’m older and slower, but maybe it’s because I always have Google at the ready: I bring my laptop everywhere, and if I don’t have it, I can easily text Google for any info I need (and of course it’s only a matter of time before we all have Google on a handheld device).

But is this a bad thing? Maybe my brain is more efficient now, I don’t know. I do think though, that I’m not as good at thinking on my feet now as I used to be.

According to this CNN report, they’ve done a study at UCLA that says that Googling is good for your brain:

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small’s study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

This is not about reading, but about searching. Basically it says that Googling effectively exercises your brain. But I don’t really know, I didn’t read the whole thing.