Can Googling delay the onset of dementia?
A new UCLA study, part of the growing research into the effects of technology on the brain, shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile — it’s like taking your brain for a walk.
It’s too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer’s disease, but “our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively,” said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Memory & Aging Research Center.
The new study, which will be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer’s cases will quadruple by 2050. In response to such projections, “brain-gyms” and memory-building computer programs have proliferated.
The subjects in Small’s nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels.
They were assigned two tasks: to read book-like text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches.
While doing so, their brains were scanned inside a specially equipped magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Half the group was familiar with Internet searching; the other half was not.
Subjects viewed simulated Web pages through goggles, then, using a finger pad to approximate an online search, pressed one of three response buttons to control the cursor. For the book reading task, they pressed a button to advance text pages.
To increase their motivation, subjects were told in advance that they would be assessed for their knowledge of the topics they researched. Topics included the benefits of eating chocolate, planning a trip to the Galapagos and how to choose a car.
The MRI results showed that both text reading and Internet searching stimulated the regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and vision. But the Internet search lit up more areas of the brain, additionally activating the…