You’re recall Nicholas Carr’s very controversial article in the Atlantic over the summer that suggested that on-line searching was making us stupid. Today, CNN.com reports on a study which purports to show the opposite! Dr. Gary Small used fMRI showed that:
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
Meanwhile cross town rival…
Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, said the findings about the brain activity differences aren’t surprising and offered this analogy: “If you wanted to study how hard people can exercise, and you take people that already exercise and people that don’t exercise, aren’t they going to be different to start out?”
Don’t you think fMRI is getting a bit oversold these days?
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 
In addition to the comments already here, which are right on the mark, and with the caveat that I’ve so far seen only the CNN account of the Small study, it seems that the ideas “smart” and the opposite are quite different in these two accounts. In the CNN account of the Small study, the quotations and commentary suggest that to have more neural activity as recorded with fMRI is to be smarter. But the Carr essay presents being smarter (or the opposite) in terms of ability to maintain sustained full attention on an intellectual task, and later on, to be able to apprehend, retain, and extend conceptual relations so as to build a complex and explanatory theory of a field of knowledge.
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It could also be that the habitual use of technology has no causal effect on neural activation (that is, it’s not even like “exercise”) . . . rather, people whose brains are already more “neurally active” during problem solving may also happen to be the ones who choose to use technology a lot.
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