Posts: Links / Is surfing the Internet altering your brain?

Good post.

From the article: "He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners. "

I would like to see these results compared to say, expert musicians vs. new players. Is it that using the internet is changing our neural networks or are these findings simply the result of mastering an attention-demanding task. We already know that our brain pathways begin to facilitate unfamiliar tasks with repeated practice (ie. learning).

Also I kind of disagree with his theory that internet use will have an evolutionary impact... if he is going to seriously single out internet-ability as a factor for selection, he would have to show that people who excel at internet use do indeed go on to breed successful families. With the net still very much at its infancy I think it's a bit far fetched at this stage of the game.

he would have to show that people who excel at internet use do indeed go on to breed successful families.

Could just be playing the part of Debbie Downer but I have my doubts that any study would be able to show such.

I would like to read a more detailed description of the methodology.

To plays devil’s advocate a bit. Perhaps there was increased activation in this area because the people who were avid internet users tend to obtain much more information from each webpage then nonexperts. I think this is what Dylan was alluding to in his comment. Basically maybe internet experts looks at a web page and are able to process so much more information about the page then a novice user and thus would need to make more decisions about the webpage hence the increased activation in these users.

I have read some papers examining cognitive and neurological differences between experts and novices and on average researchers tend to find this same pattern of results.

As much as I do believe that technology shapes our thinking and vise versa I am a bit skeptical on this studies particular claim that they are showing a causal relationship rather then a correlation between these factors.

Actually I was just reading over the article again and I realized that they never mentioned if the participants received a task while in the fMRI. I think I read a very similar study that did use that procedure. They compared expert versus novices internet users and showed them visual stimuli of webpages while in the fMRI. So I suppose my last comment about the alternative theory I had would not necessary apply to this research. It depends on what task they were given during testing. I think now I am going to have to look up this article and check the methods section out.