Slog - Comments on If You're Reading This... http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/10/if_youre_reading_this ... and you're not drunk, you likely do a fair amount of Googling. Thusly, good news from the venerable USA Today: Time spent Googling the latest campaign news or searching for choice eBay buys may help stimulate and improve the minds of middle-aged and older Americans, UCLA scientists suggest. Research reported in next month's American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry is the first to assess how performing Internet searches influences brain activity in older Americans, says study author Gary Small, professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. The research included 24 healthy volunteers ages 55 to... Copyright 2008 Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:41:33 -0800 Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:13:19 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Comment by Fnarf Wait, wait -- you're using Google to search Ebay? And it's making you smarter? Non sequitur.

]]> Fnarf http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/10/if_youre_reading_this#c1173230 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/10/if_youre_reading_this#c1173230 Teh Internets Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:48:29 -0800 Comment by Julie in Chicago All this really tells me is that people who frequently search the internet use the internet as a tool for gathering and processing information. So, when they search, their “decision-making and complex-reasoning portions of the brain” would be activated because they’re going to use the information to make a decision or to add to their knowledge base.

On the other hand, if my grandmother were to do a Google search, she is just typing words into a random box on a screen and doesn’t have any sense of what to do with the information that comes up. So, her “decision-making portion” of her brain isn’t going to be activated because she is not familiar enough with internet searching to know what she’s even looking at after she hits the “ Google Search” button, let alone to use that information to make a decision.

So, the real finding is that people who frequently search the internet know how to use the information they find (and do so), whereas people who don’t search the internet frequently don’t. Which isn’t that shocking…

]]> Julie in Chicago http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/10/if_youre_reading_this#c1173265 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/10/if_youre_reading_this#c1173265 Teh Internets Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:13:19 -0800