The Affect that Searching the Web has on the Brain

Technology surrounds our lives everyday. If a person needs to know the answer to a question, they simply type it into their iPhone and instantly get the answer. Need directions to get somewhere? Just plug in the address to the GPS device and you are on your way. Some adults are worried that all of the technology being used by the younger generations is going to have negative effects on their brains. There were two studies done recently about how searching the web affects the brain. When the results of the two studies are compared, they show that the use of new technologies does indeed affect the brain, but in neither a positive or negative way. The brain simply learns and adapts to new circumstances and has always done so. The real key to the connection between Internet searching and the brain is the goal of the search.

In one of the studies done at Penn State, the topic of Internet searching to learn was studied. When people go on the Internet, they have different reasons for finding information. People also search at very different times. Because we know our brains function differently at different times, it is clear that there is different brain functioning going on during these searches. During the study done at Penn State, participants were searching the web to access different low to high levels of learning. These levels ranged from remembering to creating. There were 476 seraching tasks in the study, and researchers tracked several different items for each search.

The areas studied were:

• number of queries
• query length
• unique terms
• number of topics
• session duration
• number of result pages viewed

The purpose of studying these catergories that go with searching the web is to see if different learning goals result in different types of searches. As the level of learning during the tasks increased from remembering (the lowest) to organizing (the fourth highest) the researchers found that participants used more search terms, stayed online longer and found more sources of information. One very interesting finding during this study was that the top two levels of learning (evaluating and creating) showed very similar online searching behavior to the two lowest level tasks. The researches guessed that when users are creating something, they look for more facts in their searches, and then rely on their creativity to complete their tasks away from the computer.

The same Penn State study showed that the behavior of people searching the web is really dictated by the task they are trying to complete. In another study, it was proven that doing online searches activates the same brain functioning as reading and even a little bit more in many cases. An MRI test was used on the participants in the study to compare their brain activity while doing the online searches and their brain activity while reading a text. The information they were learning about was focused on the same topic for the online content and the text. The results showed that both tasks activated the same regions of the brain. All of these studies show that the new technologies are not having a huge effect on the brain. It is the task being completed that truly shapes the brain function.