illicit about it. It’s cool, we won’t tell, but actually… you may be doing your boss a favor.
Turns out, the internet is becoming a part of the human brain.
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever pulled out a smart phone and used Google to look up the name of a film, a historical fact or to spell check a word you’ve used a zillion billion times before but you still can’t ever remember if the “i” comes before or after the “e.” But it’s official now. Science says so. The internet, and by extension, Google, has become a collective memory source that our brains rely on rather than remembering easily accessible trivia.
Not only do people not remember data they know they can easily retrieve from the web, they have developed the tendency to recall how to find the data instead of retaining the information itself. The human brain doesn’t seem to really be all that into remembering stuff, actually. Turns out, Mr. or Mrs. Brains-in-Your-Head is always looking for someone else to dump the remembering stuff job off on. Sometimes that’s a spouse or a close friend, and sometimes, apparently, it’s Google.
Maybe that’s why, as another gang ‘o scientists have discovered, your brain actually works better when you take regular breaks to surf the web. It’s true! Reading Comediva at work actually does make you a better, more efficient employee. A National University of Singapore study totally proved it. We swear. We’re totally not making that up. It’s in the Wall Street Journal and everything, which means it must be true.
Apparently, surfing the internet is brain food. Not only does it free up space to remember important things, like all the lyrics to every Madonna song ever written, it helps us chillax and not freak out and axe murder our bosses.
Totally awesome, right? And not at all terrifying that we’re all so dependent on wireless internet service and a whole host of random strangers chattering about stuff that they may or may not actually know anything about. The human race is in no danger of melting into little puddles of web surfing goo in front of our internet machines. Seriously. We’re not.
Just spend another hour on your Google Reader. You’ll feel better.
The good news, however, is that an unexpected new species is stepping up to take over once humanity devolves into a series of web pages.
Apes, you say? No sir. Been there, done that on the whole apes taking over the world thing.
We’re talking about elephants.
We already knew they could paint, but now, according to National Geographic, Elephants have taken another very important step towards world domination.
A young Asian Elephant named Kandula, who lives at the National Zoo in Washington D.C., has had his species’ first recorded “ah-ha!” moment. A spontaneous moment of insight that allowed him to turn a plastic block into a stool and use it to get to a nice juicy banana that researchers had been dangling just out of his reach. That means elephants have joined a very, very short list of species who have demonstrated the capacity to make spontaneous mental leaps. Apes and crows and humans are the other members of the Eureka Club… but let’s face it, these days a human would probably just Google it.
