{"id":8248,"date":"2017-11-10T10:48:47","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T15:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=8248"},"modified":"2017-11-11T22:59:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T03:59:03","slug":"how-smartphones-hijack-our-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=8248","title":{"rendered":"How smartphones hijack our minds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So you bought\u00a0that new iPhone. If you’re like the typical owner, you\u2019ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data<\/a> Apple collects. That means you\u2019ll be consulting the glossy little rectangle nearly 30,000 times over the coming year. Your new phone, like your old one, will become your constant companion and trusty factotum \u2014 your teacher, secretary, confessor, guru. The two of you will be inseparable.<\/p>\n

The smartphone is something new in the world.\u00a0We keep the gadget within reach more or less around the clock, and we use it in countless ways, consulting its apps and checking its messages and heeding its alerts scores of times a day. The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015\u00a0Gallup\u00a0survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn\u2019t imagine life without the device.<\/p>\n

We love our phones for\u00a0good\u00a0reasons. It\u2019s hard to think of another product that has\u00a0provided so many useful functions in such a handy form. But while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and a vast influence over our thinking and behavior. So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?<\/p>\n

Scientists have begun exploring that question \u2014 and what they\u2019re discovering is both fascinating and troubling. Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren\u2019t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.<\/p>\n

\n

So what happens to our minds
\nwhen we allow a single tool such dominion
\nover our perception and cognition?<\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Adrian Ward, a cognitive psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been studying the way smartphones and the internet affect our thoughts and judgments for a decade.\u00a0In his own work, as well as that of others, he\u00a0has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job.\u00a0The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.<\/p>\n

A\u00a02015 Journal of Experimental Psychology<\/em> study<\/a> found that when people\u2019s phones beep or buzz while they\u2019re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier \u2014 whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study<\/a>, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication<\/em>, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.<\/p>\n

What the earlier\u00a0research\u00a0didn\u2019t make clear is whether smartphones differ from the many other sources of distraction that crowd our lives.\u00a0Dr. Ward suspected that our attachment to our phones has grown so intense that their mere presence might diminish our intelligence. Two years ago, he and three colleagues \u2014 Kristen Duke\u00a0and\u00a0Ayelet Gneezy\u00a0from the University of California, San Diego, and Disney Research behavioral scientist\u00a0Maarten Bos \u2014 began an ingenious experiment to test his hunch.<\/p>\n

The researchers recruited 520\u00a0undergraduates\u00a0at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged \u201cavailable working-memory capacity,\u201d a measure of how fully a person\u2019s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed \u201cfluid intelligence,\u201d a person\u2019s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects\u2019 smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.<\/p>\n

The results were striking. In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone\u2019s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.<\/p>\n

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn\u2019t been a distraction\u2014that they hadn\u2019t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0second experiment\u00a0conducted by the researchers produced\u00a0similar\u00a0results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.<\/p>\n

In an April article<\/a> in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research<\/em>, Dr. Ward and\u00a0his\u00a0colleagues wrote that the \u201cintegration of smartphones into daily life\u201d appears to\u00a0cause a \u201cbrain drain\u201d that can\u00a0diminish such vital mental skills as \u201clearning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.\u201d\u00a0Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we\u2019re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. The fact that most of us now habitually keep our phones \u201cnearby and in sight,\u201d the researchers noted, only magnifies the mental toll.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ward\u2019s findings are consistent with other recently published research. In a similar but smaller 2014 study<\/a> in the journal Social Psychology<\/em>, psychologists at the University of Southern Maine found that people who had their phones in view, albeit turned off, during two demanding tests of attention and cognition made significantly more errors than did a control group whose phones remained out of sight. (The two groups performed about the same on a set of easier tests.)<\/p>\n

In another study<\/a>, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology<\/em> this year, researchers examined how smartphones affected learning in a lecture class with 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. They found that students who didn\u2019t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn\u2019t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly. A study<\/a> of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics<\/em>, found that when schools ban smartphones, students\u2019 examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.<\/p>\n

\n

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV,
\na radio, a photo album, a public library
\nand a boisterous party attended by
\neveryone you know, and then compressing them all
\ninto a single, small, radiant object.
\nThat is what a smartphone represents to us.<\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It isn\u2019t just our reasoning that takes a hit when phones are around. Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well. Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they\u00a0pull at our minds when we\u2019re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.\u00a0In a 2013 study<\/a> conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. \u201cThe mere presence of mobile phones,\u201d\u00a0the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships<\/em>, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust\u201d and diminished \u201cthe extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.\u201d\u00a0The downsides were strongest when \u201ca personally meaningful topic\u201d was being discussed. The experiment\u2019s results were validated in a subsequent study<\/a> by Virginia Tech researchers, published in 2016 in the journal Environment and Behavior<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we\u2019re not even aware of. But the findings shouldn’t be a surprise.\u00a0Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking \u2014 that has, in the psychological jargon, \u201csalience.\u201d Media and communications devices, from telephones to TV sets, have always tapped into this instinct. Whether turned on or switched off, they promise an unending supply of information and experiences. By design, they grab and hold our attention in ways natural objects never could.<\/p>\n

But even in the\u00a0history\u00a0of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls<\/a> a \u201csupernormal stimulus,\u201d one that can \u201chijack\u201d attention whenever it is part of our surroundings \u2014 and it is always part of our surroundings. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can\u2019t take our minds off it.<\/p>\n

The irony of the smartphone is that\u00a0the qualities\u00a0that make it so appealing to us \u2014 its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability \u2014 are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds. Phone makers like Apple and\u00a0Samsung\u00a0and app writers like\u00a0Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours, and we thank them by buying millions of the gadgets and downloading billions of the apps every year. Even prominent Silicon Valley insiders, such as<\/a> Apple design chief Jonathan Ive and veteran venture capitalist Roger McNamee, have begun to voice concerns<\/a> about the possible ill effects of their creations. Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said<\/a> in a recent interview. “[We]\u00a0understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”<\/p>\n

\n

As strange as it might seem, people\u2019s knowledge
\nand understanding may actually dwindle
\nas gadgets grant them easier access
\nto online data stores.<\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it\u2019s not that simple. The way a media device is designed and used exerts at least as much influence over our minds as does the information that the device disgorges.<\/p>\n

As strange as it might seem, people\u2019s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores. In a seminal 2011 study<\/a> published in Science<\/em>, a team of researchers \u2014 led by the\u00a0Columbia University\u00a0psychologist\u00a0Betsy Sparrow\u00a0and including the late Harvard memory expert\u00a0Daniel Wegner \u2014 had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as \u201cThe space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003\u201d) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.<\/p>\n

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn\u2019t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the \u201cGoogle\u00a0effect\u201d and noted its broad implications: \u201cBecause search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely off-loading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said<\/a> in an 1892 lecture, \u201cthe art of remembering is the art of thinking.\u201d Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.<\/p>\n

This story has a twist. It turns out that we aren\u2019t very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American<\/em> article<\/a>, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though \u201ctheir\u00a0own\u00a0<\/em>mental capacities\u201d had generated the information, not their devices. \u201cThe advent of the \u2018information age\u2019 seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,\u201d the scholars concluded, even though \u201cthey may know ever less about the world around them.\u201d<\/p>\n

That insight sheds light on society\u2019s current gullibility crisis, in which\u00a0people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you\u2019ll believe anything it tells you.<\/p>\n

Data, the novelist and critic\u00a0Cynthia Ozick\u00a0once wrote<\/a>, is \u201cmemory without history.\u201d Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains. When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won\u2019t solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think.\u00a0And that means putting\u00a0some distance between ourselves and our phones.<\/p>\n

This essay appeared originally<\/a>, in a slightly different form, in the Wall Street Journal. <\/em><\/p>\n

Image of iPhone X: Apple.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So you bought\u00a0that new iPhone. If you’re like the typical owner, you\u2019ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data Apple collects. That means you\u2019ll be consulting the glossy little rectangle nearly 30,000 times over the coming year. Your new phone, like your old one, will become […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8248"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8275,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions\/8275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}