Know your Net

@RANDOM

Everyone, from educators to parents to market researchers, has asked at some stage: how does the Internet affect your brain? Psychologists have come up with a few answers.

The Net is addictive: I have to admit saying "I have Internet Addictive Disorder" sounds a lot better than "I played SimCity and TextTwist all morning after wasting my time on online chat", but the syndrome doesn't appear to exist.

The researchers' subjects were people who spend more time online than average because of the nature of their work. This gave the entire sample group skewed figures in terms of number of hours spent online (a lot) and number of social interactions performed while online (low, since users were working, not socialising, online).

The methodology was suspect: instead of compiling a new addiction questionnaire, the researchers used the template for gambling addiction disorders, merely substituting "gambling" with "getting online".

So is the Net addictive? Initially, yes. First-time net users spend more time online, cut down on social interactions offline, and display all the signs of incipient Net addiction. But this behaviour smoothens out; long-term users take time off, and actually tend to use online forms of interaction (chat, email, blogs) to enhance relationships.

Multi-User Games/ Role-Playing Games online will make my child brighter/ dumber: Neither. MUGs and RPGs don't seem to have a discernible impact on IQ.

If parents monitor the game and ensure that the child doesn't overdo it, some researchers think that MUGs and RPGs are a decent way to introduce your child to the online environment. More and more of our time is spent online; more and more of our work and leisure happens online.

Interactive games, so long as you stay away from the more violent and x-rated ones, are one way of introducing your child to the culture she will have to live in as an adult.

Dealing with too much e-mail lowers your IQ: The jury is still out on this one, but it seems that it's at least partially true for a small but significant spectrum of email users.

If you're the kind who logs on twice a day to check mail, it doesn't seem to make much difference. But many people, especially in the corporate world, are under pressure to answer or at least inspect email as it comes in.

In the course of an hour, you might break off several times from work or conversation in order to check mail and then answer it.

Some researchers claim that this can lead to highly fractured attention spans, confusion and an inability to concentrate and some studies show a drop of 10 IQ points in people who are constrained to answer more than a certain amount of email every hour throughout the day.

The CIA/ The Church of the Holy Bunny/ The Devil is using the Net to monitor my movements: Psychologists report that paranoid patients have no difficulty transferring their paranoia online. I have no idea whether any of these organisations do actually monitor people, but sufferers can find evidence anywhere.

The CIA is sending them spam offering medicines that will kill them, the Devil made them visit porn sites, there are secret messages lurking in Google ad banners, aliens have implanted them with tracking devices that let anyone online monitor their movements.

If you're paranoid and the real world isn't feeding your conspiracy theories, get online, where your personal version of the truth is out there, embedded in codes on web pages only you can read. Just to get you started, today's headlines say that a three-day-long war game online is being monitored "" by the CIA.