How the Internet Is Altering Your Mind (Abstract)
How the Internet is Altering Your Mind (6)
February 8, 2013
Natalia Nunez
247
John Harris is a journalist and author, who writes regularly for the Guardian about a range of subjects built around politics, popular culture and music. His published work includes The Last Party, an acclaimed cultural history of the 1990s; and So Now Who Do We Vote For?, the primer for disaffected Labour voters that appeared just before the General Election of 2005. He is also a regular panelist on BBC2's Newsnight Review. Most of our waking days are spent in use of some technology, like TV, internet, cellphones. It seems that in this generation the TV does not dictate the teens’ lives as much as the internet does. One of the questions going around researchers’ heads is “Is Google making us stupid?” There has been research done and a book written about this subject. It has been said that if we knew much about the brain, in order to perfect it, we would end up making a web of mental circuits much like that of the internet. There was research done of the effects of the internet that were done on the brain. The experimented was a total of 24 people, 12 new users and 12 expert users of Google. Their brains were scanned under supervision and the differences were shown; the expert’s frontal cortex seemed to be a lot more active than the new users’. A week later, after the new users were told to use the internet at least an hour a day, their brains seemed to have changed and rewired to match that of the experts. This shows that the brain can be affected by very small stimuli. Based on this research, researches think that adolescents of this era are surrounded by enough of this technology to have lost some human contact skills, as well as creativity. Now that the changes have been proven scientist are debating whether it is for the good or the worse.
John Harris’ Profile. The Guardian News UK, n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.
Harris, John. "How the Internet Is Altering Your Mind." The
February 8, 2013
Natalia Nunez
247
John Harris is a journalist and author, who writes regularly for the Guardian about a range of subjects built around politics, popular culture and music. His published work includes The Last Party, an acclaimed cultural history of the 1990s; and So Now Who Do We Vote For?, the primer for disaffected Labour voters that appeared just before the General Election of 2005. He is also a regular panelist on BBC2's Newsnight Review. Most of our waking days are spent in use of some technology, like TV, internet, cellphones. It seems that in this generation the TV does not dictate the teens’ lives as much as the internet does. One of the questions going around researchers’ heads is “Is Google making us stupid?” There has been research done and a book written about this subject. It has been said that if we knew much about the brain, in order to perfect it, we would end up making a web of mental circuits much like that of the internet. There was research done of the effects of the internet that were done on the brain. The experimented was a total of 24 people, 12 new users and 12 expert users of Google. Their brains were scanned under supervision and the differences were shown; the expert’s frontal cortex seemed to be a lot more active than the new users’. A week later, after the new users were told to use the internet at least an hour a day, their brains seemed to have changed and rewired to match that of the experts. This shows that the brain can be affected by very small stimuli. Based on this research, researches think that adolescents of this era are surrounded by enough of this technology to have lost some human contact skills, as well as creativity. Now that the changes have been proven scientist are debating whether it is for the good or the worse.
John Harris’ Profile. The Guardian News UK, n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2013.
Harris, John. "How the Internet Is Altering Your Mind." The