Going Googly (Thoughts on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”)
Ed. Note: this article originally appeared on Dr. Merzenich’s blog On The Brain on August 11, 2008. It references an article by Nicholas Carr, who has recently tackled the topic in greater depth in a new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In light of the recent book release, we thought it would be interesting to revisit Dr. Merzenich’s response to Mr. Carr’s original article.
In the July-August 2008 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Nicolas Carr asks us the interesting question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article appeared at an interesting time for me, because I had been invited to deliver a lecture at Google about 2 weeks before its publication, and I had already asked Google employees the same question. My way of phrasing it: “There is absolutely no question that modern search engines and cross-referenced websites have powerfully enabled research and communication efficiencies. There is also absolutely no question that our brains are engaged less directly and more shallowly in the synthesis of information, when we use research strategies that are all about “efficiency”, “secondary (and out-of-context) referencing”, and “once over, lightly”.”
We know that brains grow and elaborate and strengthen when they are challenged, and that they change little when solutions are easy to come by. We know that brains differentially strengthen specific heavily-exercised processes. The hippocampus of a trained London taxi driver, we know as an example, is highly developed, relatively to a typical London citizen. What do you suppose happens to that hippocampus when we mount a GPS unit in the taxi, or in the typical London citizen’s vehicle? ‘Tis not a pretty picture, brain-wise!
When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates different brains. Mr. Carr records a beautiful statement from the psychologist Maryanne Wolf (a reading expert from Tufts University) that sums it all up: “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” For “we”, you can substitute “our brains”, because they (they meaning “you” and “your brain”) are synonymous.
“Hey, wait a minute”, you holler. “Aren’t Google and the Internet a tremendous positive advance, for incredibly richly supporting our personal education and research?”
Yes, they are. Personally, it is difficult imagining living without them, or without modern technology in general. But at the same time, their heavy use has neurological consequences. No one yet knows exactly what those consequences are.
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Posted: Brain plasticity, Neuroscience
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July 7th, 2010 at 8:48 am
I think it would be useful to study people who already have trouble focusing and delaying gratification and what not..
yes – those populations with adhd and other learning disabilities i suspect will be affected first by the web.
I also fear that the rise of interactive websites will cause our executive functions to not mature.
I think at the moment we only see the negative effects on the brain – but if games for change can take off like it needs to – perhaps we can play games that teach us to focus and analyze and sythesize everything.
The real issue now that goes unnoticed though is that the internet is quite addicting.
you will find that young mothers are increasingly sucked into the web on their own – instead of playing with their baby.
This leads to slight neglect on a regular basis – something that produces worse outcomes for children than intense experiences of abuse once or twice.
July 8th, 2010 at 6:14 am
There’s a quote; “anything worth doing is never easy”, I feel that this speaks volumes to this topic in that when an individual undertakes a difficult task he is charged to obtain information and resources which are difficult to acquire. Google makes these tasks much easier but in most cases eliminates interpersonal interactions which are beneficial to cognitive development and a sense of community. People are so connected technologically that they are disconnected physically and socially, I would propose that when people undertake tasks which require research and peer input they use Google moderately and do what they can through mail, telephone and other less technological means of networking. I’m not saying that people should not use Google rather that they should compensate with another activity such as team building and initiative tasks which charge a group of individuals to draw upon the immediately available resources and people within the group to find solutions to a problem.
July 8th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Excellent points, Jon and David. Thank you for sharing.
July 8th, 2010 at 10:04 pm
The idea that ‘the internet/google is making us stupid’ is one that doesn’t resonate well with me. What is ‘stupid’ anyway? I’m a computer programmer, so yes; I’m a stupid carpenter, but a really smart I.T guy. It’s all relative.
I think it’s more useful to say (as you somewhat already have) ‘the internet/google is making us DIFFERENT’. The way we can access information has changed, aren’t our brains just changing to adapt to this?
Yes they have consequences, but are they all bad? Or is it all just an example of adaptation? I might not learn a single subject in-depth like I would have in the past, when I might have only one or two reference materials available, but the new skill I have to master is being able to take disparate sources of information and integrate them into a whole, sometimes bringing knowledge from far-reaching subject areas together in associations that previously I would not have discovered (had the information not been so readily available and ‘linkable’). I think these kinds of new skills are what make the saying “we’re training our kids for jobs that don’t even exist yet”. Through our adaptation, we’re creating new classes of skills that never existed in the past.
If we really were getting ‘dumber’, the pace of technological change would slow down, not speed up. Look at the pace at which we came up with a bird flu vaccine. Would we have been ‘smart’ enough to do that 30 years ago?
July 9th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
I think Nicolas Carr uses the “Is Google Making Us Stupid” headline to be provocative… and indeed, I agree, it’s not stupider or smarter, it’s different!