The Internet makes us dumber. Lately, various authors—frequently neurologists—for instance Baroness Susan Greenfield and Manfred Spitzer, in Digitale Demenz (“Digital Dementia”), his book from 2012, have showed up from a new association of technological critics who appear to concur that people are becoming more foolish due to all of the technological advances that has been happening. However, what hypothesize in their books—very solid, occasionally not totally justifiable positions—should be taken while maintaining a certain degree of skepticism, they allude to the ductility of the human brain in stating that the Internet is reprogramming our brains in a detrimental way. It is surely evident that the Flynn effect (the observed ascent in IQ scores over time) has stopped in certain nations, however the cause of this stop are neither uniform nor clear. James Flynn—who gave a name to this effect— shared his questions in his 2012 book Are We Getting Smarter? concerning whether the effect really calculates that we really have become more intelligent. There are different probable causes for the ascent in the test scores, for example, education getting more similar to the IQ tests. It is even proposed that the better scores on IQ tests are results from increased luckier guessing on more difficult test items. Consequently, it is not apparent that the Internet might be partly in charge for the stop in the occurrence, since we do not know for sure what really caused the Flynn effect. The utilization of new media, is even observed by some writers to be a major contributory factor in the ascent of average IQ that has been apparent in recent years. Developing alongside Internet technologies, “Digital Natives” often drift toward “shallow” data preparing behaviors described by fast attention switching and decreased contemplation. They tend to multitask more, which is connected to decreased ability in concentrating and bad executive control abilities. Higher frequency of Internet-related addictive behaviors that reflect changed reward-processing and self-control mechanisms is also displayed by digital natives. Connection between these Internet-related psychological effects and systemic changes in the brain has also been suggested by recent neuroimaging examinations. It is also to be taken into consideration that many of these researches studied the impact of television as opposed to the impact of interactive technology, for instance smartphones and social media. Likewise note that in the majority of these researches, a correlation is found, instead of a cause-and-effect relation; that is, there might be different causes as to why youngsters who watch a lot of television have worse school results.
