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Internet Searching Stimulates Brain, Study Finds

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San Francisco Chronicle

Published: December 12, 2008

Can Googling delay the onset of dementia?

One recent study shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile. The study comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer's cases will quadruple by 2050.

It's too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer's disease, but "our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively," said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of University of California, Los Angeles Memory & Aging Research Center.

The subjects in the nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels. They were assigned two tasks: to read booklike text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches. While doing so, their brains were scanned inside a specially equipped magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Half the group was familiar with Internet searching; the other half was not.

The MRI results showed both text reading and Internet searching stimulated the regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and vision. But the Internet search lit up more areas of the brain, additionally activating the regions controlling complex reasoning and decision-making. The increased brain activity, which is probably due to the many rapid choices such searches involve, suggests that subjects had a richer sensory experience and heightened attention.

The implications are provocative, particularly because it is well-known that developments in technology affect human behavior.

"People who are more adept with the technology will be more successful in society, and their offspring will be more likely to excel," Small says.

Some researchers, including Kevin Lee, deputy executive director of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which funds research on aging, say such statements go too far.

"The printed book and typewriters may change our brains, individually, over a lifetime," Lee said. "But whether using computers would change our genetic makeup is something that would only happen over thousands of years."

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