Google's making us smarter

No point paraphrasing - here's John Battelle's latest ripost to Nick Carr:

Well, Nick, sorry, but here's at least one study backing up my contention:

A new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for the brain. Searching online triggers areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

A study at the University of California, Los Angeles, measured brain activity of older adults as they searched the Web.

"There's so much interest in exercising our minds as we age," said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. "One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active."

To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Hear Baroness Greenfield's thoughts here on the impact screen-based technologies are having on our capacity for deep reading.