Doing Internet Searches Boosts Older Brains 65
Hugh Pickens writes "Medical News Daily reports that researchers have found signs of enhanced neural stimulation in parts of the brain that control decision-making and reasoning when they scanned the brains of middle-aged and older first-time Internet users after only seven days of performing Internet searches. 'We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function,' says Dr Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. At the start of the study, the participants performed Internet searches while the researchers took fMRI scans of their brains to track changes in blood flow in the brain and record subtle changes in neural activity. After practicing searching the Internet for 7 days over 2 weeks at home, the brains of the Internet novices showed activity in the same regions as before, but this time there was new activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, the parts of the brain that are important for working memory and decision-making. 'You can exercise your mind by using the Internet, but it depends on how it's used,' adds Small. 'If you get hooked on gambling or eBay shopping, that may not be positive.'"
First thought. (Score:2, Funny)
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http://images.google.com/url?source=imgres&ct=ref&q=http://www.funnymyspacegraphics.net/attitude3.htm&usg=AFQjCNHW4xq7jd64zlsbTKPKLelMY8h8Kg [google.com]
If searching stimulates brain activity.... (Score:4, Funny)
Space Travel for the common man (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!
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If searching stimulates brain activity, then I ought to have found all the zeros to the Riemann zeta function, cured cancer and AIDS, and devised a way to travel to Mars for 50 cents.
Hey, come up with a way for the common man to go to Mars. Rich rappers like 50 Cents can pay their own way!
On the contrary, I'd pay good money for 50 Cent and Kanye West to travel to Mars, so long as the trip was guaranteed one-way.
Mars Immigration Department Called (Score:2)
Mars Immigration Department called and said they would take 50. But they will not grant Kanye a travel visa under any circumstances. Probably because the Intergalactic Awards Show is coming up soon and will be hosted there.
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Searching for pr0n doesn't count. However, your visual cortex has enlarged enough that your eyes are going to asplode.
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Trouble is, if you do a search for the Riemann zeta function, all you'll get is 1,000,000,000 hits for a particularly attractive actress. And that'll stimulate activity, but for the wrong brain.
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Very funny, but... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Riemann+zeta+function [lmgtfy.com]
No control condition? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm pretty sure it's not.
There's an unbelieveably profound effect that net access brings, even after the "guttersnipe" activities.
You & friends are moping around your hangout wondering whether Saul Rubinek's latest show had anything to do with a guest episode he played 19ish years ago.
(Hyberbolic drama)
Oh come on. You don't know who Saul Rubinek is?? Oh you do. Good.
Did you forget what his new show is? No? Also good.
Now, did you get his guest episode? Do you even know the show? (Yes you do, but you're g
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"You don't know who Saul Rubinek is??"
If he wasn't in the Bible, where he persecuted Jesus, then I have no idea. Did he ever do anything worth knowing about?
Re:Who? (Score:3, Interesting)
Brilliant Setup-Man to my standup riff.
That of course is what we used to ask each other. Now you can look it up.
That is, except we have now replaced having no hope of knowing who someone is with being too lazy to bother.
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Oh come on. You don't know who Saul Rubinek is??
Yeah, he played Lon Cohen in A Nero Wolfe Mystery. Except the pilot, where he played Saul Panzer.
(And now everyone else runs off to the Internet to confirm that. What can I say? Loved that show.)
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Re:No control condition? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly. "Learning new skills stimulates brain -- film at 11" would be a better headline.
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Still, some new skills stimulate the brain more than others. I was surprised to find that learning a new keymap stimulated my brain the same amount as immersing myself in a foreign language for a few hours. (Both experiences resulted in a sort of mental tiredness and mild difficulty speaking English. It was surreal.)
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However I think internet searching may be more effective then just learning a new skill. When you search threw the stuff you find a lot of stuff that you have never though about based on that topic... For example I just did a google search for well. Thinking of a Well for water where Little Timmy can fall in. Then the first search result was for Wells Fargo then there are a bunch of site for wellness and there is a result for digging a well. So for that search result I was exposed 3 different idea at once
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BREAKING NEWS... (Score:2, Funny)
Performing or learning uncommon or new tasks stimulates brain activity.
Up next, how IMPORTANT SCIENCE TYPE PEOPLE claim that thinking causes increased brain activity.
More at eleven...
IMPORTANT UPDATE!! (Score:1)
slashdot lowers readers' IQs.
Also, I can't believe no one broke out a Billy Madison quote for this story. e.g. "...and we are all dumber for having heard it. You are awarded zero points and may God have mercy on your soul." "A simple 'no' would have done."
It doesn't seem so hard (Score:3, Insightful)
1 - Click browser's search box.
2 - Type 'P', 'O', 'R', 'N'.
3 - Press 'Enter'.
I can't imagine a scenario where a search stimulates brain acti... Ohhh, ok. I get it now.
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1 - Click browser's search box. 2 - Type 'P', 'O', 'R', 'N'. 3 - Press 'Enter'.
I can't imagine a scenario where a search stimulates brain acti... Ohhh, ok. I get it now.
It stimulates "parts of the brain that control decision-making and reasoning" when they try to work out how to pay off their credit card bill and how to explain their browser history to their wives.
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No, no, you got it wrong.
"parts of the brain that control decision-making and reasoning"
This is clearly about the decision-making brain, not the intracraneal mundane problems solver.
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If it doesn't seem hard, you're not searching for the good stuff.
(at least for men)
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It's supposed to stimulate activity in the thinker head, not the other one...
Well, they do need to find innovative ways (Score:1, Funny)
First.... oh hell (Score:3, Funny)
I would have gotten first post but I had to Google to find what a "post" [annandave.org] was. I think I found one.
Now get off my.... uh, what was I talking about again?
Doing searches (Score:1)
provides older people the best way to phrase a search, it forces them to come up with
things that are related to their questions. Simple.
Re:Doing searches (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish my mom and sister would learn this "simple" technique. I always get the call... My first question is always, "did you google it? No? Why don't you try? Hey, look, first response to is an answer to your question. See, that only took 30 seconds and you've been hemming and hawing for the last 2 hours and finally decided to call me."
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Oblig. XKCD (Score:3, Informative)
Obligatory XKCD. [xkcd.org].
New stuff (Score:1, Redundant)
I suspect the boost is simply that they're doing something new to them. I doubt that old people who have been online for years would get the same "boost" from just searching.
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It's all part of the "plan" (Score:2)
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Obligatory reference (Score:2)
This is your old brain, this is your old brain on internet searches. Any questions, grandpa?
In other words... (Score:2, Interesting)
Quaero ergo cogito?
catch22 (Score:2)
I was gonna improve my brain 'n all but I can' remember what I was gonna search for... :-/
Not Internet Related (Score:1)
Too much of a good thing? (Score:1)
If you make people think... (Score:5, Interesting)
... their brain works more.
That's all there is to it. Age, searching, internet, none of that is relevant other than being conditions under which it can happen. Identical results can be had with kids doing stem completion tasks (E A _ _ _ = E A R T H), college students doing a Stroop task (words naming colors, in that color or a different one), and any brain you can get to sit still and problem solve while stuck inside a tube with horrible noises going on.
TFA is a prime example of someone doing a far too specific test on a general principle and either thinking or pretending to have discovered something. I'm going to go with "pretending" since the new results after practice were seen in the middle and interior frontal gyri, and he claims these results are due to two specific processing tasks, but neglects to mention that the two regions make up more than half the frontal lobes in which there are obviously a great number of things going on, many of which would be occurring during the task, their design is completely incapable of telling the difference between excitatory and inhibitory activation, and there is no word on whether the 'enhanced' neural activity correlated with improved ability to search and/or answer relevant questions, without which one could just as easily make a case that the increased activation was a sign of boredom for having to do the same damn stuff again that they've been doing the past two weeks at home.
Someone needs to do a study and see whether asking hard questions about this stuff of researchers giving talks on it when they clearly don't know enough about what they're doing makes their brains light up in the right places, because if you make people think, their brain works harder. Wouldn't have happened here, because they wouldn't have been forced to answer the questions -- this was just a poster. Anyone can get any poster into one of these conferences as long as it says fMRI on it.
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... their brain works more.
That's all there is to it. Age, searching, internet, none of that is relevant other than being conditions under which it can happen. Identical results can be had with kids doing stem completion tasks (E A _ _ _ = E A R T H), college students doing a Stroop task (words naming colors, in that color or a different one), and any brain you can get to sit still and problem solve while stuck inside a tube with horrible noises going on.
TFA is a prime example of someone doing a far too specific test on a general principle and either thinking or pretending to have discovered something. I'm going to go with "pretending" since the new results after practice were seen in the middle and interior frontal gyri, and he claims these results are due to two specific processing tasks, but neglects to mention that the two regions make up more than half the frontal lobes in which there are obviously a great number of things going on, many of which would be occurring during the task, their design is completely incapable of telling the difference between excitatory and inhibitory activation, and there is no word on whether the 'enhanced' neural activity correlated with improved ability to search and/or answer relevant questions, without which one could just as easily make a case that the increased activation was a sign of boredom for having to do the same damn stuff again that they've been doing the past two weeks at home.
Someone needs to do a study and see whether asking hard questions about this stuff of researchers giving talks on it when they clearly don't know enough about what they're doing makes their brains light up in the right places, because if you make people think, their brain works harder. Wouldn't have happened here, because they wouldn't have been forced to answer the questions -- this was just a poster. Anyone can get any poster into one of these conferences as long as it says fMRI on it.
I teach elderly people how to use the internet along with other computer skills. It actually does help them as unlike simply learning something new, the internet and computer skills quickly leads onto a range of other skills that they can pick up quickly by themselves. If you think young people are good at picking up computer skills you should try working in primary schools with mainly young women teachers. Most can hardly get past simple word processing. The difficulty of teaching the elderly in not to do
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E A _ _ _ = E A R T H
No, it's E A T E N you turkey. And swiss. On rye. With mustard! Mmm.
Yes, I'm hungry. I'm always hungry, can you tell?
In other news, dead salmon (Score:2)
The neural activity measured in several dead salmon shows a clear reaction to human faces. This proves beyond a doubt the accuracy of studies based on mass EEG tests.
http://sciencestage.com/resources/dead-salmon-responds-portraits-people [sciencestage.com]
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You mean fMRI. EEG has nothing to do with the salmon study.
That said, TFA cites fMRI also, so your comparison to the salmon study is plausible, if not terribly informative.
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first-time Internet users (Score:2)
first-time Internet users
That must be a strange population, very distinct from normal society. I'm not sure their brain data is relevant to ours.
Medicine Porn Story (Score:2)
It sounds like somebody speaking Engrish on the streets of Hong Kong, hawking pirated DVDs of "Hot Nurses 4". "You there, you want Medicine Porn Story!"
In related news (Score:1)
Web surfers have found a significant increase in half-decayed jelly-like substances in the cloud. Forensics reveal that these jelly-like substances were once ancient living organisms which died from traumatic acceleration. "Something must have boosted these jellies," says Cloud Detective Henry Dave, "it appears that the older these organisms get, the more suspect they become to being forcibly accelerated away from their shells while doing Internet searches."