Study: The Internet Could Be Hampering Your In-Built Knowledge

The other day a study revealed that internet addicts were more prone to catching the cold and the flu. In case that wasn’t bad enough and a good reason to get off the computer and go out more, a new study has been conducted and it has been found that using too much internet can actually hamper for in-built knowledge.

So what is in-built knowledge? Basically this is the knowledge that we have learnt and gathered over the years that’s stored in our brains. However with the internet and the fact that everything we need to know is online, it can actually lead to the hampering of our in-built knowledge which is obviously not a good thing.

According to lead researcher Matthew Fisher from Yale University, “The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world’s knowledge at your fingertips.” To prove their case, the researchers conducted an experiment that asks participants common questions.

They then told participants specifically that they could/could not use the internet to find the answer, and were later asked how confident they felt about providing the answers to the questions. Unsurprisingly participants who could use the internet to find what they were looking for felt more confident about relaying the answers, something that Fisher has warned about.

According to him, ”It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Web
Tags: internet, study