The first call with a mobile phone was made 50 years ago.
Since then, these devices have become an essential tool that helps us carry on with our lives. But do they also alter the way our brain works?
Like many of us, I spend too much time in the cell phone. And, like many of us, I am well 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. However, sooner than I’d like to admit, I end up walking down the aisle for something I need to get done that I can only do, or do most efficiently, over the phone.
Pay a bill? Phone. Arrange a coffee date with a friend? Phone. Send messages to relatives who live far away? Phone. Check the weather, jot down a story idea, take a photo or video, create a photo book, listen to a podcast, upload driving directions using GPS, do a quick calculation, even turn on a flashlight? Phone, phone, phone.
A recent report found that adults in the United States review their cell phones 344 times a day on averageonce every four minutes, and they spend almost three hours a day on their devices.
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 suddenly we find ourselves sucked into endless scrolling (swipe vertically on a touch screen to view content).
It is a vicious circle. The more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, we create more neural pathways that lead us to raise our cell phones to do any task, and we feel more need to review them even when it is not required.
Concerns regarding specific aspects of our hyper-connected world aside, such as social media and its increasingly hyper-realistic beauty filters, what is dependence on these devices doing to our brains? Is it all bad or are there also some advantages?
The disadvantages of mobile phone
Unsurprisingly, while our societal dependence on cell phones increases rapidly each year, research struggles to keep up.
What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking a phone can have negative consequences. This is not very surprising: in general, we know that doing many things at once hurts memory and performance.
One of the most dangerous examples is using the cell phone while driving. One study found that simply talking on the phone, without texting, was enough to make drivers react more slowly on the road.
It is also true for everyday tasks that involve less risk. Simply hearing a notification ding caused participants in one study to perform much worse on a task, almost as poorly as participants who talked or texted on the phone during the task.
The mere proximity of a phone, it seems, contributes to “drain” our brains, that they may be subconsciously working hard to inhibit the desire to check these devices or constantly monitoring the environment to see if we should do so (for example, waiting for a notification).
Either way, this diverted attention can make anything else more difficult.
The advantages
However, researchers recently discovered that there might also be some advantages to reliance on ours cell phones.
For example, it is commonly believed that relying on phones stunts the ability to remember. But it may not be that simple.
In a recent study, volunteers were shown a screen with numbered circles that they had to drag to one side or the other. The higher the number on the circle, the more the volunteer would be paid for moving it to the correct side.
During half of the tests, the participants were allowed to write down on the screen which circles should go in which direction. For the other half they had to rely on memory alone.
Predictably, accessing digital reminders contributed to the performance of the participants. What was unexpected is that when they used the reminders, they not only remembered better the (high-value) circles that the participants wrote down, but also the (low-value) circles that they had not written down.
The researchers believe that by entrusting the most important (high-value) information to a device, the participants’ memories were freed up to store the low-value information.
However, when they no longer had access to the reminders, the memories they had created regarding the low-value circles persisted, but they might not recall the higher-value ones.
It will take years of research before we know exactly what impact our cell phone dependency has on our long-term cognition and willpower.
Meanwhile, there is another way in which we can try to mitigate its harmful effects. And it has to do with the way we think regarding our brains.
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As David Robson wrote in his book The expectation effect Recent research challenges the premise that if we exercise our willpower in one way (for example, by resisting looking at our phone), we deplete our general reserves and make it harder for us to focus on other tasks.
This may be true. But Robson says it largely depends on our beliefs.
People who think their brains have limited resources—for example, that resisting one temptation makes it harder to resist the next—are more likely to score that way on tests.
However, those who think thatyour brain has unlimited resourcesand the more we resist temptation, the more we strengthen the ability to continue resisting temptation, conclude that developing mental fatigue by exercising self-control on one task does not negatively affect performance on the next.
Even more fascinating having a limited or unrestricted view of the brain may be largely culturaland Western countries such as the United States are more likely to view the mind as limited compared to other cultures, such as India.
What do I take from this? To reduce the need to mindlessly search for my phone, I will continue to leave it in another room. But I will also repeat to myself that my brain has more resources than I think, and that every time I resist the temptation to check my phone, I’m establishing new neural pathways that will make resisting that temptation ever easier. And maybe even others in the future.
Taken from Cubadebate
