How The Internet Affects The Human Brain Changes Its...

Rough Draft Are you on the connected to the internet every day? If so, your brain’s way of functioning is changing, for better or for worse. After five days of accessing the internet, the human brain changes its pathways and alters how it retains information. When a person uses the internet repeatedly, their brain remembers facts based on where to find the information instead of the actual information. Depending on the age of the person using the internet and how frequently they use it, the brain function and social skills normally being learned through face to face contact is altered as well as memory. As we continue to use the internet as a form of external memory, we are starting to rely on it much like the Greeks started to rely on†¦show more content†¦Since the use of the internet is still a new mode of accessing information, there is very little we know about the effects it has on our brains. Even what we are finding now could be interpreted for or against internet use. In the article â€Å"Neuroscience: Browsing and the Brain,† the authors analyze two books written by experts in the field that have opposing views. Both see similar information, but one interprets it as positive effects and the other sees them as negative. Since the topic is still relatively new, we don’t have enough evidence to make a definite statement in either direction. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, according to the authors in the article, takes a negative view on the research available. He sees the activity of using the internet as a negative experience because the changes it causes the brain may lead to loss of other ways of processing information. In Nick Bilton’s I Live in the Future sees the use of the internet as solely positive, creating new possibilities for the human brain to function, allowing the brain to adapt and explore the new possibilities. The information both of the books are based on is an MRI study that is explained in â€Å"Y our Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching.† The study was taken to understand how the human brain functions with differing levels of internet use. A test is administered to