With apologies to David St. Hubbins, lead guitarist of the immortal rock band Spinal Tap, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. Just a few months after a controversial cover story in The Atlantic, titled ‘Is Google Making us Stupid,’ comes a new study suggesting that searching online could benefit the brain. The study, conducted at UCLA, divided 24 people into two groups: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy. It found that members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online (the only difference between the groups was their technological experience). The numbers in the study, while small, was adequate to see a significant difference between the two groups, said Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.
