Channel C: Google Makes You Smarter!

The most e-mailed story on the BBC today reports that a team from the University of California Los Angeles found that searching the web stimulates centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning, which in turn can improve brain function. Who would have thought that looking for things like this would actually make you smarter?

Not Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation—which argues that the digital age is creating a generation of idiots—or Nicholas Carr, who wrote the Atlantic's cover story Is Google Making Us Stoopid? a few months back. We're pleased that this latest study sends Messrs. Bauerlein and Carr a big "FU!" on behalf of all the bloggers, Youtubers, and Internet lovers around the world. But does everyone agree?

Summer Johnson at Bioethics.com blogs that a good Google search does more for you than an old-fashioned page turner:

• The most internet savvy among us get the most out of internet searching. So toss that library card, unless you use it to access the Web, and get surfing—to boost the mind and better the memory.

Tim from SansBlogue compares Carr's critique of the digital age to Socrates claim that the then-new technology of alphabetic writing would dumb his contemporaries down:

• Like Socrates he is correct, memory has been eroded by writing and the capacity for sequential sustained reading is being eroded by the Internet. Also, like Socrates, he is wrong, the human capacity for living is not eroded so easily and the new mental states are not (most of us believe—since few today voluntarily give up writing and advocate burning libraries to the ground) worse.

The study is good news for older folk trying to keep their minds in tip-top shape.