Is the Internet making us less smart?

Before I retired in 2008, I was “wired” to the Internet about an hour a day. But since I retired, I have been spending at least four hours a day “connected”—writing and answering e-mails, reading USA Today, scanning the New York Times home page and the Inquirer, Googling, searching PubMed for a recent treatment of migraine, or surfing Yahoo Finance for changes in the prices of McDonalds, AT&T, Coke, Walmart, PLDT, etc.

With so much of my time spent wired to the Internet, my wife is telling me that I am addicted to it. Maybe she is right. When I wake up at 3 in the morning, I am tapping and swiping my iPad, checking Yahoo finance if the US stock market is up or down. I am connected for about an hour until the market closes at 4 p.m. in the East Coast. My second waking time is about four hours later, at 7:30 a.m., and automatically, like clockwork, my right hand reaches for my iPad to read my e-mails. Breakfast has become secondary.

I can’t help but wonder what is going on in my brain. New studies from the laboratories of cognitive researchers are showing that the brain tissue is plastic. Its anatomy and function respond to the environment, what we habitually do, and think about.

In a 2005 interview, neuroscientist and brain plasticity expert Michael Merzenich commented on the power of the Internet to alter brain structure: “Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability.” In a blog in 2008, he acknowledged that while it is hard to imagine living without the Internet and Google, he wrote to emphasize in capital letters: “THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES.”

The consequences are still being debated by experts all over the world. Some experts are concerned that when we go online, we are using a tool that promotes superficial reading and distracted and hurried thinking.

Others argue that by the nature of how most applications and websites are structured and delivered—interactive, repetitive and addictive—both children and adults are hooked easily on spending most of their waking hours “connected,” thus reducing productivity. In children, it can lead to skipping classes and going to an Internet café, resulting in school failure.

Some psychologists are concerned about the high-speed system of delivering rewards, called positive reinforcements, which can push the Net user to addiction, just like laboratory rats pressing on a lever to get tiny bits of social reward.

Because of the availability of billions of information with an easy click or swipe, the Net user is instantly swamped with data so that filtering critical information becomes more difficult. A Swedish neuroscientist, Torkel Klingberg, commented that we “seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which we are overwhelmed with information.” Studies have also shown that when we are given many choices, it is more difficult to make a decision.

One educational psychologist who has studied how the brain forms memory is Australian John Sweller. He has spent about three decades studying this topic, and he has proposed two major compartments of memory: short- and long-term memory. Our immediate thoughts, sensations and impressions go to the short-term compartment, which lasts only for a few seconds.

Through repetition and focused attention or thinking, the short-term memory becomes long-term, or lasting for days, weeks, or decades. Some cognitive experts are worried that with the Internet’s inherent fleeting and rapid changes of presentation of facts, the short-term memories are not transformed into long-term schemas. And for understanding and knowledge to occur, short-term sensations and impressions should move over to the long-term memory compartment.

Jordan Grafman, the head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, explained that with the rapid shifting of our attention, we will be attuned to multitasking, leaving behind our capacity for deep thought that leads to innovation and productivity.

“The more you multitask, the less deliberate you become, the less able to think and reason out,” Grafman said.

As a pediatrician, my concern with the Internet is the prolonged inactivity of children sitting in front of a computer monitor. This can result in obesity and its many negative health consequences like diabetes, heart disease, stroke and early death in adulthood.

Being physically inactive has a significant bad effect on forming new brain cells. Recent studies have shown that with exercise, more brain cells are created in the hippocampus, the memory center. This process is called neurogenesis, which all of us need to be smarter.

The Internet is the latest addicting 21st-century tool that has given us easy access to almost anything with a tap, swipe, or click. However, when it is used excessively, the capacity for deep thought suffers.

Dr. Leonardo L. Leonidas ([email protected]) retired in 2008 as assistant clinical professor in pediatrics from Boston’s Tufts University School of Medicine, where he was recognized with a Distinguished Career in Teaching Award in 2009. He is a 1968 graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and now spends some of his time in the province of Aklan.