Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

Which of these questions is true: Does the internet make you dumber? Does the internet make you smarter? The answers might surprise you.   

The internet brought us email, instant messaging, and online searching. We can find information and exchange it at lightning-speed compared to 30 years ago. With a smartphone, you can connect as you travel, at all times of the day. People have worried that the internet is rewiring our brains, destroying our capacity to focus, stealing our memories, and generally dumbing us down. There’s little evidence of it, so far.

Overall when a team at the University of California in Los Angeles addressed the topic of “Brain health consequences of digital technology use” in 2020, it concluded that there were both pluses and minuses.

It’s possible that extensive screen time is interfering with emotional and social intelligence while aggravating attention problems, especially in teens. But brain scans show that when older people who haven’t searched online do so for the first time, parts of their brains light up in positive ways. In addition, certain computer programs and videogames may improve memory, fluid intelligence, and other cognitive abilities, the group noted.

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We've always worried how technology may change us

People have publicly said they thought they were experiencing bad effects from technology. In 2008, the writer Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He later wrote the book, “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember.” He confessed that “the Net seems to be… chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation…. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

Technological change tends to produce these worries, neuroscientist writer Christian Jarrett notes in “Great Myths of the Brain.” In 1566, a Swiss scientist named Conrad Gessner fretted that the printing press would cause confusing information overload. The appearance of radio and then TV led to public concern about distraction and lost conversation. All change creates the possibility of anxiety, psychologists tell us.

Clearly, the arrival of personal electronic devices and sprawling Wi-Fi has created temptation to browse and an attempt to multitask. People aren’t as good at multitasking as they often think they are (for a vast majority of us, it’s physiologically impossible for your brain to multitask with any efficiency), and when you’re being ignored by someone playing with his phone rudeness can look like stupidity.

So ... does the internet make you dumber or smarter?

This all doesn’t mean we’re becoming less adept at mental tasks, only that we’re using our time differently. Carr says that easy browsing is making us less introspective. Yet, computer use can be stimulating, too.

In one 2009 study, researchers scanned the brains of 24 volunteers aged 55 to 76, while they read from a book and then while they conducted searches online. Half of the group were considered web-savvy. When they were web-searching, the brain scans showed that areas associated with decision making and complex reasoning lit up — more so than when they were reading.

Jarrett reports unpublished research at the University of Arizona with elderly subjects who had been trained to use Facebook for two months. They showed an improvement of 25 percent on tests of working memory, beating a control group that kept online diaries but didn’t use Facebook.

People who use computers tend to appear to be smarter, for instance in a 2010 study that examined the abilities of 2,671 people aged 32 to 84. After controlling for age, sex, education, and health status, the researchers concluded that individuals who frequently used a computer scored significantly higher on a cognitive skills test than those who seldom did.

There does appear to be evidence that handwriting, rather than tapping keys, helps us think. But we can teach kids to write without taking away their phones, and instead urge them to use those phones to look up facts whenever necessary. How many raging dinner-table arguments are now quickly resolved by a Google search?

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