Foreign Research

2. “Why the Internet Is Making Us Smarter”
published by Nick morgan
Lots of commentators have bemoaned the
rise of the Internet, and before that television,
arguing that these evil distractions have shortened
our attention spans and caused us to become
digital idiots, capable of only the briefest moments
of focus.
But all of this handwringing is missing the
real point. It’s not that we’re becoming dumber, it’s
rather that the object of our focus has changed. In
one way, we’re actually getting smarter – much,
much smarter.

3. Society – work, entertainment, and the arts –
have been shifting from print to visual at a rapidly
accelerating rate over the past half-century years. In
the past decade, with the rise of broadband and the
Internet, the shift has moved into high gear
We’re only just beginning to learn how to
create, present, and absorb information in visual
terms. We’re like the first producers and readers of
books as they became mass-producible.

4. Now we’re in the same early stages of the
visual information explosion. YouTube is primitive,
but powerful. Our ability to absorb visual
information is accelerating rapidly. If you compare
video – and movies – of the last few years with a
movie from the 1940s, the difference in visual
density and pacing is astonishing.
We’re learning a new language and a new
medium. We can now handle visual shortcuts and
codes that would have baffled us even
20 years ago.

5. “The Internet makes you think you’re
smarter than you really are” published by Isha Aran
As anyone who’s ever consulted their phone to
look up the name of the actor who played that kid
in that 80s sitcom? Having easy access to the
Internet can make us humans feel supernaturally
smart—but cut off our connection, and alas, we
return to our mortal mental state.

6. “The Internet is such a powerful
environment, where you can enter any
question, and you basically have access to
the world’s knowledge at your
fingertips,” said Matthew Fisher, lead
researcher on the study, in a statement.
The study appears in the American
Psychological Association’s Journal of
Experimental Psychology.
“It becomes easier to confuse your
own knowledge with this external source,”
he said. “When people are truly on their
own, they may be wildly inaccurate about
how much they know and how dependent
they are on the Internet.”

7. •
Researchers gave one group of participants a specific
URL to research a question (“Why are there dimples
on a golf ball?”). The other group did not have
Internet access, but the researchers provided them
with the same exact explanation as the first group
found online. Sure enough, the Internet researchers
were more confident in their ability to answer the
question.
In another, especially striking experiment, participants
who had access to the Internet actually thought their
brains were more active. When presented with a
series of functional MRI scans and asked to choose
which represented their brain activity, they chose the
more active images.

8. In another experiment, both the Internet
research group and the non-Internet group were
given a series of autobiographical questions such
as “Why are you so close with your best friend?”
They were then asked to rate how well they could
explain their answers. Turns out, even with so
much information at their fingertips, the Internet
access group wasn’t any more confident in their
relationship smarts than the non-Internet folks.
Moral of the story: Internet access doesn’t make you
personally smarter, so don’t go thinking you’re Lex
Luthor (in an intellectual sense) just because you
have WiFi.

9. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2012/11/28/why-
the-internet-is-making-us-smarter-in-one-
way/#2fd21baf45b0
http://fusion.net/story/112328/study-the-internet-makes-
you-think-youre-smarter-than-you-really-are/