Google, the humble search engine, has grown a lot over the years.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, Google was a product that anticipated needs, ranking a list of websites by how relevant they were to a query.
It’s an advertising powerhouse, building a series of products that run our lives -- like Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Chrome -- and under its new umbrella corporation, Alphabet, the company is developing products like driverless cars and surgical robots that promise to transform our lives.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, Google was a product that anticipated needs, ranking a list of websites by how relevant they were to a query.
But what really matters is the length of that list.
Google spits out massive amounts of information. Even the name Google, a misspelling of "googol" -- the number one followed by 100 zeros -- is innuendo, delivering a promise of massive amounts of results with each search.
How are these massive information dumps affecting how we think? That’s the question that intrigued Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA who studies the aging brain. In the fall of 2006, Small and his wife, Gigi Vorgan, were hard at work on a book about how the Internet changes the brain when they realized no one had studied what happens to the brain when a person searches online.
“I was very curious,” says Small. So he ran a study.
He took 24 subjects -- 12 people who often used search engines and 12 who rarely used them -- and gave each person an MRI to see their brain activity while they Googled. What Small found surprised him: As they Googled, his subjects' brains lit up.
Small published his findings in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry in 2009, in a paper titled “Your Brain on Google.” According to Small’s research, using a search engine increased activity in the regions of the brain dealing with decision making, complex reasoning and vision. Also, the more-experienced Internet users exhibited more than twice as much brain activity as the less-experienced subjects, leading Small to predict that the more we search, the stronger the brain’s reaction to searching.
“It’s a model that’s very similar to what happens when you start exercising your muscles,” he says. “It's exhausting at first, and then once you start increasing the weight, you can lift more weight with less energy.”
On Vine, a user jokes about how tiring Google searches are.
"The good news about that study is we can retrain our brain to reactivate those skills," explains Small. "Nothing is being lost forever."
No comments:
Post a Comment