UCLA scientists conducted a study on the impact of the internet on neuronal activity.
They examined the neural circuitry of two teams of participants, one doing internet searches while the other was reading books. It appeared that the internet stimulates areas controlling complex reasoning and decision-making, whereas books don’t.
Source: UCLA Newsroom
According to the principal investigator Dr. Gary Small, “Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function.”
On the other hand, the technology writer Nicholas Carr argues in his book that “we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet”.
Indeed although internet gives us access to unlimited information, it has fragmented our knowledge and makes it more difficult to have an overview about a topic. Carr takes the example of Google: “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web […] we don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”
Moreover when working on a computer, our concentration is always distracted by what Carr calls the “ecosystem of interruption technologies”: we click on links, we check our emails, we go on Facebook, on Twitter… Because of its plasticity, the brain adapts to this permanent multi-tasking state. As a consequence it is more difficult for internet users to only focus on a difficult text. In the worst scenario in the future we won’t be able to read books anymore.
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