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Is the Internet making us stupid?
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The global spread of the Internet is raising concerns among the public in the fields of general education and knowledge. Society is worried if the open access to the information makes people less intelligent by excluding the need for researching or memorizing it. On the other hand, scientific progress has significantly gained its speed since the introduction of the Net, which might demonstrate its positive impact on people's intellectual abilities. The Internet is becoming the dominant universal medium through which people read and disseminate information. In comparison to the good old text book, the internet also allows for constant interruptions which discourages deep concentration, attentive thinking and contemplative thinkers. Is the Internet making us stupid? In an article in Science, Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist who runs UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center, reviewed dozens of studies on how different media technologies influence our cognitive abilities. Some of the studies indicated that certain computer tasks, like playing video games, increase the speed at which people can shift their focus among icons and other images on screens. Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and more automatic thinking.
In one experiment at an American university, half a class of students was allowed to use internet-connected laptops during a lecture, while other half had to keep their computers shut. Those who browsed the web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well they retained the lecture's content. Earlier experiments revealed that as the number of links in an online document goes up, reading comprehension falls, and as more types of information are placed on a screen, we remember less of what we see.
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Greenfield concluded that every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others'. Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can strengthen the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of rapidly changing signals, like piloting a plane or monitoring a patient during surgery. However, that has been accompanied by 'new weakness in higher-order cognitive processes, including 'abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem-solving, critical thinking and imagination'. We're becoming, in a word, shallower.
Studies of our behavior online support this conclusion. German researchers found that web browsers usually spend less than ten seconds looking at a page. Even people doing academic research online tent to 'bounce' rapidly between documents, rarely reading more than a page or two, according to University College London study. Such mental juggling takes a big toll. In a recent experiment at Stanford University, researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia. The researchers were surprised by the results. They expected the intensive multitaskers to have gained some mental advantages. That wasn't the case, though. In fact, the multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. Everything distracts them," said Clifford Nass, one of the researchers.
It would be one thing if the ill effects went away as soon as we turned off our computers and mobiles, but they don't. the cellular structure of the human brain, scientists have discovered.adapts readily to the tools we use to find, store and share information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain neutral pathways and weakens others. The attentions shape the way we think even when we're not using the technology. The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are being 'massively remodelled by our ever-intensifying use of the web and related media. In 2009, he said that he was profoundly worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant distractions and interruptions the internet bombards us with. The long-term effect on the quality of our intellectual lives, he said could be 'deadly'.
