Diablog

Your grandma might think that the Internet is rotting your brain, but it's possible if she did a little face-time with Google that she could stay sharper in the noggin herself. In a new study, Internet novices who were instructed to search the web showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with making decisions and memory in just two weeks, according to a poster presented today at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference.

The work comes from a UCLA research team including Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry, and builds off of a previous study we covered in the June issue of Popular Science. He had previously shown that people who already are using the Internet more have more activity in areas of the brain related to complex reasoning, but that study couldn't define what was cause and effect (maybe people with better complex reasoning skills are more drawn to the Internet).