Has Google Begun To Rewire Our Brains?

Hey Steemians

So when I'm not interacting on Steemit, believe it or not, I do have a day job. Which revolves around optimising websites to improve their visibility on Google and no not with paid ads. I'm referring to the actual organic listings you click on when you perform a search. This discipline is known as SEO and very few people know about it and even fewer people give a shit about it.

In fact, when I tell people that's what I do for a living they would say something like but doesn't Google just work by itself with algorithms and bots and machine learning. Yes in a sense it does but its pretty rudimentary at this stage and needs help from guys and girls like us to make sure search remains as relevant as possible.

It's a selfless job but someones gotta make sure you find that find the cheapest flights, or that pasta recipe or how to find the closest KFC in your area (Yes South African's I'm talking to you on this one. Why is this our most popular search term for 2017? WHY???!)

Fascination with peoples questions & behaviours

Googling or rather using search has become a very personal experience for some its just a wham bam think you ma'am give me what I want. While for others its a slow foreplay, light some candles, put on some music and we're going to do all sorts of searches in the comfort of your own home.

Looking at search data all damn day in big ass spreadsheets that often crash and lead me to tears does take me down some of the strangest paths. Looking at peoples search queries, the way the search, the words and phrases they use, where they're searching from can be very entertaining if you have the patience for it, but also a window into the intermate experiences people have with searching for information online.

As I've been studying the data and trends for years I've noticed how reliant people have become on search engines. It has become an almost symbiotic relationship and people place way too much faith in the results returned without questioning them.

This sort of behaviour I feel has begun to rewire the way our brains work, especially the younger generation who never had the opportunity to explore alternative means of finding information. How many kids today do you think Googled "Library near me", probably not many!

Back in the day

Before the internet or before search was so popular and advanced if someone asked you a tricky question, you had a couple of options.

• You could see if anyone you knew had the answer.
• You could pull out an encyclopedia. (I miss Encarta and Brittanica so much)
• You could head down to the library to carry out research.

Whichever one you opted for, it was almost certainly more complicated and time-consuming than what you’d do today: Google it.

Thanks to this technology we've become spoilt we don't even have to remember the correct spelling anymore just throw some random words into a field click search and more often than not it spits out what you're looking for.

It's brilliant and convenient but with all these comforts and advantages at our fingertips, are we not beginning to outsource our memory, problem-solving and more cognitive thought to the internet?

Our virtual brain

The answer seems to be a resounding yes, according to recent research. The latest study, from academics at the universities of California and Illinois, found that our increasing reliance on the internet is transforming the way we think and remember.

In the study, two groups of people were asked to answer a set of trivia questions. Those in the first group were told to use only their memories, while the others had to look up the answers online. Both groups were then asked a set of easier questions and given the option of using the internet. Those who had used the internet the first time round were much more likely to do so again.

Not only were they more likely to refer to the internet, but they were also quicker to do so, making very little attempt to figure out the answer themselves, even when the questions were relatively simple.

All of this is evidence of a trend the researchers refer to as “cognitive offloading”. It has become so easy to just look something up online, we’re giving up even trying to remember certain things.

“Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother. As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives,” Benjamin Storm, the study’s lead author, said.

How the internet changes our brains

This latest study builds on existing research that suggests the internet isn’t just changing how we live and work – it’s actually altering our brains.

For anyone familiar with the work of neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, this won’t come as a surprise. After all, that’s what our brain is made to do. “It’s constructed for change. It’s all about change,” he explains in his popular TED talk.

The more important question, then, is whether or not this is a good thing. “It seems pretty clear that memory is changing,” Storm told us. “But is it changing for the better? At this point, we don’t know.”

Indeed, opinion seems divided as to whether this is a positive or negative development.

Some argue that by removing the need for learning – a system under which we were forced to memorize dates, names and facts – the internet has helped free up cognitive resources for other, more important things.

Nicholas Carr, the author of What the internet is doing to our brains, isn’t so optimistic.

By relying on the internet as an external hard drive for our memory, we are losing the ability to transfer the facts we hear and read on a daily basis from our working memory to our long-term one – something Carr describes as “essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom”.

“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists and educators point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” he writes.

From post-it notes to iPhones

While much more research into the consequences of this remains to be done, perhaps the change isn’t as significant as we might think.

After all, as technology writer Clive Thompson points out, we’ve actually been outsourcing our memory for a long time.

“Humanity has always relied on coping devices to handle the details for us. We’ve long stored knowledge in books and on paper and post-it notes.” It’s just that today, we turn to more sophisticated tools for that helping hand. “You can stop worrying about your iPhone moving your memory outside your head. It moved out a long time ago,” Thompson says.

And for Storm and the team of researchers behind this latest study, that might not be such a bad thing.

“In the end I’m, fairly optimistic. I think the internet (and technology more generally) is going to greatly expand the capabilities of the human mind.”

With great power comes great responsibility

My personal feeling on the subject is that it is going to have a negative effect on the way we use our brains, cognitive offloading needs to be handled with care as it can quickly encourage information bias, misinformation and the distribution of propaganda.

We need to teach people to use Google/Search responsible and how to decern facts, opinions and what is reliable information. How to evaluate information and encourage them to review counter arguments and not just accept information presented to them as commandments. To use Google search has become in my opinion a vice of society, and like any nice, alcohol, sex, gambling it can be helpful and fun but in moderation. It needs to be used in the right mindset and to be used responsibly.

Yes, it's time to take personal responsibility and not always pointing fingers at CEOS of tech companies pushing their profit agendas on us.

Look we can talk all day about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry & Sergi, the Zuck and all the silicon valley pioneers who helped shape this digital age. They are smart dudes don't get me wrong but good old Uncle Ben's words of wisdom will always stand the test of time in my book. If it was good enough for Peter Parker, then it's good enough for me!

Have at it

What do you think of Google rewriting our brains?
Do you think it frees us up to be more creative and gives us more brain power to focus on more complex issues?
Or is it stripping us from using our brains more often and keeping it as sharp as possible by constantly challenging it?

Do you trust Google results? Have you ever questioned them before? Do you look at anything after the top 3 lists? Have you ever been to page 2? Do you use alternative search tools like Bing or DuckDuck Go? I'd love to hear how you use search!

Holla at your boy in the comments!

Let's connect

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Sources:

• We Forum