Comments on If You're Reading This...

Wait, wait -- you're using Google to search Ebay? And it's making you smarter? Non sequitur.

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…