The Doctor Weighs In

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D

I used to be one of those amateur opinionators who predicted the end of Homo sapiens, especially the sapiens part, as a result of the corrosive effect the Internet on our fragile brain. After all, wouldn’t you guess that the fact that one can get in one fell Google an answer to a crossword puzzle entry or to a difficult diagnosis that had eluded the best diagnosticians in the hospital – would simply make our brain even lazier than it is wired to be? On the other side of the debate were those who argued that the Internet teaches us to think and act in new and unconventional ways.

Mea Culpa.

I was wrong. Investigators at UCLA discovered that daily one hour of surfing the web actually increases the IQ, and improves the memory of adults.

The investigators compared the brain activity of participants of 55-76 years of age that rarely used the internet with that of people who use the internet daily. The subjects had to perform searches on the internet for an hour a day. Five days later areas of the prefrontal cortex, the region that is in charge of making decisions and integrating complex information arriving from different areas of the brain, were significantly more active. According to Gary Small, leader of the research team and professor of Psychiatry, these areas were quite inactive at the beginning of the experiment. But, five days later these areas were as active in the group that had not been active Internet users as in the group of regular internet users. This is one more demonstration of how fast the brain can change and improve –another instance of what is called “brain plasticity”. The research adds a neurobiological basis to the observation that average IQ has been continuously increasing since the advent of the digital culture. The capacity to process information quickly and to perform several tasks in parallel without errors (multitasking), has Improved as well. Even boring and repetitive tasks improved decision making. The selectivity inherent in cleaning up incoming mail on a daily basis helped the development of better skills of going over large quantities of information rapidly and deciding what was important and what was not. 

So if they are so smart, how come they are so…

But not everything is so wonderful in the new Wide World of Digital. According to Small “digital natives”, those who were born into the computerized and aggregated information age and who regard these technologies as a natural part of their world, tend to have lower listening skills as compared to the “digital immigrants”. Their social skills are inferior to those of the digital troglodytes. “Today’s youth can spend eight hours or longer at the computer screen exposing their brain to the digital technology. But the time spent watching TV or surfing the web is time taken away from what is required to create and fix the neuronal connections required for face to face communication.

Small calls it “the brain gap” between young and adults. “What use to be a simple generation gap has become a huge chasm, which has led to two different cultures.  

My Take

1. This research confirms and lends biological basis to the intuitive observations that ‘something is different about the young generation’. Sociologists and instant commentators in the media labeled them generation X, generation Y, the “me” generation, and assorted other non-informative names. The “digital generation” rings more substantive.
2. The remedy for the afflictions of an all-digital world is balance. Kids should play on the street, families should have dinner together and talk to each other –these are simple, non-technological things that we digital immigrants used to do as a matter of course but now seem as relics of a quaint distant past.
3. Last but not least, I can’t resist a smug smile: I knew we were better.