clipped from: www.popsci.com   

New Evidence Suggests That Using the Internet Might Make You Smarter, Not Rot Your Brain


Dispelling the myth that surfing the Web is a time-draining waste of neurons



"The simple headline here is that Google is making us smarter," says Gary Small of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California at Los Angeles. Thank you, Dr. Small. And thank you, Internet, for not only helping me dig up this information but also juicing up my brain while I looked for it. Small recently published results showing that searching the Internet does for the brains of older folks what doing bench presses does for chest muscles.


Future studies will examine how much the increased neural activity improves — or possibly hinders — intelligence, but Small thinks that the "Web naive" group could build up their brain muscle by logging more time on the Internet.