Surf the Net, Boost Your IQ
That’s right, using the InterWebs makes you smarter. Surfing porn 24/7? You become a friggin’ Einstein. eSarcasm has the exclusive.
Great news. The time you’re wasting right now at eSarcasm (yes, even you) is actually good for your brain. According to researchers at UCLA, surfing the Web improves both your memory and your ability to make decisions.
Per Popular Science:
In a new study, Internet novices who were instructed to search the web showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with making decisions and memory in just two weeks, according to a poster presented today at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference.
And by “a poster,” they mean a 16-by-24 broadsheet stapled to a telephone poll next to bunch of flyers for garage band drummers and lost cats. But we love any theory that claims our bad habits are actually good for us, so we’re running with it.
How do they know this? It’s all via the magic of MRI. Researchers scanned the brains of two groups – one with Web experience, the other complete novices – forced them to surf the Web an hour a day for a week, then scanned their brains again. The novice group showed much greater activity in the areas of the brain associated with memory and decision making.
This is what they got:
Our conclusion: We’re online for approximately 23.5 hours a day, so we must be friggin’ geniuses. And if you’re demented – for example, posting two different stories about the same study in the same week chiding other Web sites for doing the same thing a year apart – it works even better.
eSarcasm has pushed this research even further. We took a small sample group (two very experienced Net surfers) and subjected them to at least one hour of Internet porn each day for a week. Actually, it was closer to 8 hours a day, not including bathroom breaks. Then we scanned their brains using an ordinary Xerox machine.
The results speak for themselves:
See, your IQ has already increased 5 percent just by reading this. Unfortunately, your chances of getting laid just decreased by 10 percent. As Vint Cerf famously said, The right hand giveth, and the left hand is smeareth with petroleum jelly.
Images: Popular Science, Porn Brain, NatalieDee
Tweet
Get fresh geek humor delivered daily: RSS | E-Mail | Twitter | Widgets
