A variety of studies have suggested that engaging in mental heavy lifting of any sort not only draws the brain into the task but actually can change the way the brain responds to the task. The greater mental engagement that results is thought to create a sort of mental reserve that can protect the brain in the face of insult and injury; it also appears to preserve mental function in the face of aging.
Related Stories
A new study of older individuals has now looked at brain activity as subjects undertake Internet searches and it concludes that, for regular Internet users, far more of the brain gets engaged when searching than when reading.
Like other studies that rely on fantastically expensive functional MRI equipment, this one had a small subject population: a dozen each of regular Internet users and Internet novices. The savvy users typically went online a minimum of once daily, while, on average, the novice group reported using the Internet either not at all or once a month. The average age of both groups was in the early to mid-60s.
Once in the MRI tube, the subjects were given one of two tasks: read some text formatted along the lines of a typical book page or undertake a simplified Internet search. Both tasks could be managed by a simplified set of controls that both fit in the MRI apparatus and did not cause significant head movement. Runs lasted for four minutes for each task, and the topics of the reading passages and searches were identical, which should limit the impact of the details of the task on the mental processing involved.
For the Internet novices, searching didn't significantly change the areas of the brain that were engaged, which have previously been implicated in mediating language, reading, memory, and visual activity. Although there were differences within these regions, the most significant difference was that reading engaged more areas of the brain than searching did for Internet novices.
This was most certainly not the case for regular users of the Internet; far more areas of the brain were active when these users were engaged in searches than when they simply read static content. Volume measurements suggest that nearly twice as much of the brain was engaged when the experienced users searched than when naive users did. The additional areas engaged included those thought to be involved in decision making and complex reasoning. The implications are that those familiar with Internet searches have learned to become mentally engaged in the process in a way that goes well beyond reading.
The authors caution against reading too much into the results, given the small sample size. They also suggest that factors beyond the actual process of searching could influence the neural activity. "The decision to avoid technology may reflect a pattern of other lifestyle choices that could explain our findings," they note.
Still, taken at face value, the results appear to suggest that frequent access to information on the Internet can create a higher mental engagement with the content. Given the value of mental engagement in helping preserve brain function, especially as people age, the results suggest a potentially positive role for Internet use in aging populations.
These results will be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
VIA arstechnica
No comments:
Post a Comment