Google Is Making People Smarter

Name
Tutor
Course
Date
Google is Making People Smarter
Albert Einstein once said, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” The words of Einstein are arguably truer today when computers have become ubiquitous personal gadgets than during his time. In today’s era of the Internet and personal computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, people have any information they would like literally at their fingertips, be it important scientific facts, encyclopedias, and dictionaries or baseless entertainment gossip. All they have to do is just “google it.” Hence it comes as no surprise when science tells us that search engines such as Google are altering the way our brains obtain and retain information (Gravity Ideas). Search engine technology makes access the Internet – with its vast database of information and services - tremendously easy. Despite concerns that search engine technology affects people’s cognitive ability to retain memory, circulation of information and knowledge has increased since the advent of the Internet, and as a result, people are becoming better informed and smarter.
The search engine technology epitomized by Google brings within easy reach vast databases of information and knowledge, more than any human brain can memorize or store. This means that the average person of today can in a moments notice access, refer to or state information that could have been acquired as easily, even by the brightest of the minds in the pre-Google times. This has made learning universally accessible for people across the world, bringing to the common man much information, which traditionally was the reserve of editors, Journalists, and academics (Nisbet, 1.33 – 3.02). Since the Internet can be accessed instantaneously and from any place at any time, people now have access to knowledge whenever, wherever they need it.
Scientific studies have shown that Google positively alters brain activity during Internet searches; this is according to Garry Small, a Neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles. In a study dubbed “Your Brain on Google” that used MRI to measure brain activity during a simulated internet search, then compared it to reading a page in a book found that there was a two-fold increase brain activity in the brains of internet savvy people when conducting searches on the internet. The experiment concluded that the google search activates parts of the brain that are responsible for decision-making and short time memory (Small, 06.14 – 08. 10).
The whole idea of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as a measure of intelligence is based on attributes such as short-term memory, analytical thinking, mathematical problem solving and spatial recognition. Google searches on the internet cause an increase in activity in the areas associated with short term memory and problem-solving (Small, 8.00- 8.12). Hence, one can draw the inference that Google searches do increase people’s IQs when engaged in an internet search.
On the flip side of the benefits a...