How Does Google Affects Human Intelligence?

Every day, people around the globe intentionally spend time having their intelligence stripped away by a black hole, a black hole that is known as Google. According to dictionary.com the definition of intelligence is the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity (“intelligence”). With the increase of technology more and more people rely on Google to obtain answers instead of exercising their own capacity for mental activity. What most people don’t know is the adverse affects Google is having on their intelligence. When people spend a copious amount of time on Google their intelligence is decreased. Google decreases human intelligence because spending time on Google shortens human attention spans and
Attention span is the ability to stay focused on one item for a period of time without getting distracted. With Google available at the click of a button the World Wide Web of information is available at someone’s fingertips to look up anything they want. With all of this information, paying attention to one certain topic or sentence becomes very difficult. Nicholas Carr of the newspaper The Atlantic explains “I feel if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”(2). Carr use to be able to pay attention to readings for long periods of time but now is struggling to read long complicated texts. This is due to the excess amount of information available when using Google. There is so much information, instead of trying to steadily absorb what he is reading Carr now just skims through the text. Decreasing the attention spent on one-item decreases capacity for understanding complex information. Because maintaining attention on a certain topic helps to understand that topic, when Google decreases human’s attention span this results in a decrease of