Infographic: The Internet is Ruining Your Brain

[Marco925]

All those hours spent on wikipedia are BAD for me?

 

[teddymines]

"Trippled?" Someone should have used the internet to spell check.

 

[thorimmortal]

Didn't Ron Jeremy already tell us this a few years ago? Sounds like wasted research to me.

 

[greenspoon]

[citation][nom]Marco925[/nom]All those hours spent on wikipedia are BAD for me?[/citation]

Well, as Michael Scott said, "You know wikipedia is accurate information because anyone can write anything they want."

Or something like that.

 

[Guest]

OF coarse they found something like this. How else would they get more funding? If they found no problem they wouldn't have anything to request more funding for! Duh!

 

[pocketdrummer]

[citation][nom]kingius[/nom]The warning is there. Let those intelligent enough to heed it, do so.[/citation]

Says the guy on an internet forum >.

 

[gm0n3y]

Correlation != Causation. Its more likely that depressed people have low levels of social interaction and tend to use the internet more heavily because of that.

 

[jacobdrj]

Internet not ruin brain. Me good. Brain good. Eat food now. Where fridge?

 

[Guest]

Good old psychology, where every theory is correct and none are falsifiable.

It's really a science though, honest.

 

[Guest]

Wow, how atrocious! I don't mean what the internet is doing to our brains (I'm not too worried about that), but the mangling of science.

The correlation-is-not-causation problem is egregious here. Maybe depression causes people to use the internet more. Or some third factor (low self-esteem; bad impulse control) causes both depression and excessive internet use. Maybe people with lower amounts of white matter in the regions listed have less ability to control their impulses or regulate their time on the internet - that's actually plausible.

The only way to get around the correlation problem is to randomly assign some people to use the internet (people who have never been on it before, mind you) and some to stay the hell off it, and then measure changes in depression, white matter, etc. over time. It might be that studies have actually done this, but this blogger sure doesn't explain it that way.

One modicum of truth here: multitasking does make people perform very badly at all the tasks their doing. However, I'd take "stress, reduced thinking speed and creative ability" with a grain of salt. Could be true, but I don't think we have a good body of evidence for those things.

And... having skills for finding information, instead of storing it all in your brain... Isn't that what every librarian tried to teach us in school? Isn't that a good thing? I dunno. I think the internet only makes you dumber if you use it in a dumb way.

 

[wild9]

[citation][nom]pjmelect[/nom]The Internet is for porn and wa*king does you good.[/citation]

Iy've heard itt can hav an addverse affect on ya splelling.

 

[LePhuronn]

"I'm gonna do an internet!" http/www.youtube.com/watch?v=tscztF6Pi8s


Although I do subscribe to the memory-retention thing - I cannot for the life of me remember any of the trickier bits of PHP and JavaScript until I look it up

 

[eddieroolz]

I've found myself to be the opposite of this; I retain information much better when I read it online.

 

[becherovka]

This is a case of "ignorance is bliss" + "lack of exercise = depression"

I don't think they back up their claim very well.

 

[spoonless eddie]

"You don't need to know everything you just need to know where it's written down" has been the standard approach to information overload my whole life. It's not about the internet. Yes, we are becoming sociopathic curs, probably due to a lack of socialization. The national average IQ is dropping as well. But while the internet is a factor, I believe there are a number of causes.

 

[Tab54o]

This article is also part of the internet.

 

[The_Trutherizer]

Personally I remember most of the crap I read on the internet.

 

[The_Trutherizer]

[citation][nom]The_Trutherizer[/nom]Personally I remember most of the crap I read on the internet.[/citation]

Drives my friends insane

 

[f-14]

i had a boss who said never trust anything written in crayon.
now i understand why.
in this study they forgot to account for porn and the reason why we keep going back to the same "information" aka porn video; all the time and misinterpreted that as brain drain/depression when really it's something on the emotional, memory, sensory and speech oh and lets not forget physical side that is being 'stimulated' and after that is done and we look over at our wife/girlfriend/cat/dog/empty home, we become depressed realizing it's not the stellar looks of the porn star in the "information" we constantly keep reviewing.

this lack of "information" that was excluded from the study removes all the findings credibility as it is flawed.
anybody who denys this, is a terrible liar.

 

[Guest]

I'm in the 0,00000...1% with 50 tabs open LOL