Photo credit, ivan aragon alonso
- Author, Amanda Ruggeri
- Role, BBC
The first cell phone call was made 50 years ago.
Since then, these devices have become an essential tool to help us lead our lives. But do they also modify the functioning of our brain?
Like many of us, I spend way too much time on my cell phone. And, like many of us, I am acutely aware of this and often feel guilty.
Sometimes I leave it at the other end of the house or turn it off to use it less often. However, sooner than I care to admit, I find myself walking down the hall to do something I need to do that I can’t do, or do more efficiently, than on my phone.
Pay a bill? Organizing a coffee date with a friend? Send messages to family members who live far away? Check the weather, jot down a story idea, take a photo or video, create a photo book, listen to a podcast, load directions using GPS, do a quick calculation, even turn on a flashlight ? Phone, phone, phone.
Photo credit, Getty Images
According to a recent report, American adults check their cell phones an average of 344 times a day, or once every four minutes, and spend nearly three hours a day on their device.
The problem for many of us is that a brief phone-related task leads to a quick check of our email or social media, and we’re suddenly sucked into endless scrolling (swiping vertically on a touchscreen to view content).
It’s a vicious circle. The more useful our phones are, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more neural pathways we create that drive us to pick up our phone to perform any task, and the more we feel the need to consult it even when it’s not necessary.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Many daily tasks are performed using mobile phones.
Leaving aside specific aspects of our hyper-connected world, such as social media and its increasingly hyper-realistic beauty filters, what are the effects of addiction to these devices on our brains?
The disadvantages of cell phones
It’s no surprise that research struggles to keep up with our social addiction to mobile phones, which is growing rapidly year following year.
What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking your phone can have negative consequences. This is not very surprising: in general, we know that multitasking hurts memory and performance.
One of the most dangerous examples is using a cell phone while driving. A study has shown that simply talking on the phone, without texting, was enough to slow down the reaction of drivers on the road.
The same goes for everyday tasks that carry less risk. Just hearing a “ding” notification made participants in one study perform significantly worse on a task, almost as badly as participants who spoke or texted on the phone during the task.
It seems that the mere proximity of a phone contributes to “ringing” our brain, which may unconsciously try to inhibit the desire to consult these devices or constantly monitor the environment to see if we should do so (for example , pending notification).
Either way, this diverted attention can make anything else more difficult.
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A quick task on a cell phone can often lead to tedious scrolling and increase our mental workload.
The only “solution”, according to the researchers, is to place the device in a completely different room.
That’s (part of) the bad news.
Advantages
However, researchers have recently discovered that reliance on our cell phones may also have some benefits.
For example, it is commonly accepted that the use of a telephone reduces memory capacity. But it may not be that simple.
In a recent study, volunteers saw a screen with numbered circles that they had to swipe to one side or the other. The higher the circle number, the more the volunteer was paid to move it to the correct side.
For half of the trials, participants were allowed to write on the screen which circles should go in which direction. For the other half, they had to rely solely on their memory.
As expected, access to digital reminders helped participants’ performance. What was unexpected was that when they used the recalls, they remembered better not only the (high value) circles that the participants had noted, but also the (low value) circles that they hadn’t. not rated.
The researchers believe that by entrusting the most important (high-value) information to a device, the participants freed up their memory to store the less valuable information.
However, when they no longer had access to the recalls, the memories they had created regarding the lower value circles persisted, but they might not recall the higher value circles.
It will take years of research before we know exactly the impact of our cell phone addiction on our long-term willpower and cognition.
In the meantime, there is another way to try to lessen its ill effects. It’s regarding how we design our brain.
As David Robson wrote in his book “The Expectancy Effect”, recent research challenges the principle that if we exercise our will in a certain way (for example, by resisting looking at our phone), we ” deplete” our global reserves and it is more difficult for us to concentrate on other tasks.
It may be true. But Robson says a lot of it depends on our beliefs.
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People who think their brain has “limited” resources (meaning that resisting one temptation makes it harder to resist the next) are more likely to score this result on tests.
In contrast, those who believe that their brain has unlimited resources and that the more we resist temptation, the more we strengthen our ability to continue resisting temptation, conclude that developing mental fatigue by exercising self-control on one task does not negatively affect their performance on the next task.
Even more fascinatingly, whether or not you have a limited view of the brain can be largely cultural, and Western countries such as the United States are more likely to see the mind as limited than other cultures, such as the United States. ‘India.
What do I take away from it? To reduce the need to mindlessly grab my phone, I will continue to leave it in another room. But I’ll also tell myself that my brain has more resources than I realize, and every time I resist the temptation to check my phone, I’m establishing new neural pathways that will allow me to resist that ever-increasing temptation. easier. And maybe even more in the future.
