Internet Surfing is Great for Your Brain
by Allie Comeau on October 19, 2008 
Leave the first comment
It may be time to tell Grandma and Grandpa to start Googling themselves. Turns out, internet surfing is good for the aging brain.
Where brain activity is concerned, the old adage, “use it or lose it” rings true. Learning new skills throughout your life will help you to stay strong mentally. Internet surfing, and learning today’s new technologies, can keep an aging brain firing on all circuits.
A recent neurological study found significant differences in brain activity between two groups of seniors – one group was studied while reading a book and the other while using the internet. The group that was using the internet had significantly increased activity in the part of the brain that controls complex reasoning and and decision-making.
“The way I theorized is that when we are confronted with new mental challenges, we don’t know how to deal with it,” researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA said in the article on MSNBC. “We don’t engage neural circuits. Once we figure out a strategy, we engage those circuits.”
As the brain ages, its entire structure changes and parts of it actually weaken if they’re not being engaged. Working memory, brain speed, control, and other cognitive abilities all begin to decline.
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 between mental activity and physical activity: “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 starting out?”
The bottom line here is that mental exercise is especially important for the aging brain – as important as physical exercise is for the aging body. Because using a computer and learning about how the internet works is so challenging for seniors, it also gives them an outstanding mental workout, thus maintaining mental health.
“It does so much for the mind,” Tobey Gordon Dichter, the founder of a nonprofit group, Generations on Line, said about searching online. “It allows for the mind to take you where you want to go. It’s on-demand information.”
