Technology has benefited societies greatly. But in some areas, not so much.

Many feel modern society is causing us to lose our individuality and even our humanity. Most recently the argument lies around the smartphone – A single device fulfilling multiple needs simultaneously. However, one must wonder if our smartphones are causing us to mentally take the path of least resistance.

William Griffith a cellular neuroscientist at Texas A&M calls the brain a plastic organ – “As the synapses and pathways between neurons are used, they gain the ability to become strengthened or permanently enhanced. This is the building block of how memory works… Just as muscles in the body atrophy when you don’t use them, the brain will deteriorate when it’s not stimulated.”

The question is whether our smartphones are stimulating or deteriorating our synapses.

I would argue the smartphone is not really providing mental stimulation. Just the opposite. Who needs to use our brain to remember phone numbers, dates, calculations or information if our phones can do it for us?

It’s kind of like we’re  walking around with a little brain in our hand? You know, those little digitally connected devices that seems to do our thinking and remembering for us.

Phones aren’t smart people are:

Today, there’s no need to keep information or think through problems, because the answers are just a swipe and click away. No need to enjoy experiences, we can just take a selfie or video to remember for us later.  Who needs to study history, read maps, remember birthdays, calculate figures, and fill our brains with that pesky information humans partook in for thousands of years.

With the help of our smartphones we can take the path of least resistance, making little effort to stimulate our brains. This is most readily seen in today’s younger population that’s integrated the phone into their everyday waking hour.

To start, let’s look at some research done at the University of Texas at Austin noted in an article called, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer.   The study showed that even the mere visible presence of our phone lowers our thinking ability. As noted in an article in psychology today – ..Researchers found that someone’s ability to hold and process data significantly improved if his or her smartphone was in another room, while taking a test to gauge attentional control and cognitive processes. Participants who kept their phones in a pocket or bag also outperformed those who kept their phones on the desk while taking the same test. Again, even if the phone was turned off and face down on the desk, the mere sight of one’s own smartphone seemed to induce “brain drain” by depleting finite cognitive resources…

Adrian Ward, the lead researcher, explained these findings this way, “We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases. Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process—the process of requiring yourself to not think about something—uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.”

Current research on Smartphone’s effect on mental processes.

Neuroscience Says Your Smartphone May Be Making You Stupid – Inc.

• “Another study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (this April) tested 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.  Students who didn’t bring their phones to class scored a full letter higher than students who brought their phones, even though the latter students didn’t use their phones.”
• A study of 91 secondary schools in the U.K., published in Labour Economics.  It found that when schools banned smart phones, student scores went up substantially–and the weakest students’ scores went up the most.”
• “A 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study of 166 subjects found focus immediately wavered when phones beeped or buzzed.  The subjects’ work declined significantly, even if they didn’t answer.”

What smartphone photography is doing to our memories – Vox

• “Just taking photos in general was enough to decrease scores on a memory test,” says Emma Templeton, a Dartmouth psychological researcher who was a co-author of the study.  Why? The simple answer is that the camera is a distraction. “It could just be that we’re using these devices, distracting ourselves from the experience, and because of that distraction, we don’t remember the thing we’re supposed to be paying attention to,”

Smartphone use may affect teenagers’ memory, new study reveals. – EuroNews

• “Young people who put their mobile phone on their right ear during calls are exposed to a decline in their memory capacity, according to the Swiss Institute of Tropical Health and Public Health (Swiss TPH), whose research is published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives….The brain areas related to the memory are in the right hemisphere of the brain…”
• “Potential risks to the brain can be minimised by using headphones or the loud speaker while calling, in particular when network quality is low and the mobile phone is functioning at maximum power,” Röösli explained. The study found that other aspects of wireless communication use, such as sending text messages, playing games or browsing the internet showed only marginal RF-EMF exposure to the brain and were not associated with the development of memory performance…”

Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning. – National Library of Medicine (all quotes taken directly from article)

• The sharp penetration of smartphones, both across global

  

  markets and into consumers’ everyday lives, represents a phenomenon high in “meaning and mattering” (e.g., Kernan 1979; Mick 2006)—one that has the potential to affect the welfare of billions of consumers worldwide. As individuals increasingly turn to smartphone screens for managing and enhancing their daily lives, we must ask how dependence on these devices affects the ability to think and function in the world off-screen. Smartphones promise to create a surplus of resources, productivity, and time (e.g., Turkle 2011; Lee 2016); however, they may also create unexpected deficits.

• In June 2016, another study reported that the typical smartphone owner interacts with his or her phone an average of 85 times per day. This includes immediately upon waking up, just before going to sleep, and oftentimes in the middle of the night.
• Once attention has been shifted to the smartphone for one purpose (e.g., by virtue of a specific notification source), users often then engage in a chain of subsequent task-unrelated acts on the smartphone, thereby extending the period of disruption. Studies exploring these ‘within-phone’ interruptions have found that task completion in one app can be delayed by up to 400% by an unintended interruption from another app (Leiva et al., 2012). And, some evidence suggests that the more “rich” (e.g., including a visual image rather than just text) the information encountered during an interruption, the more detrimental the distraction is likely to be with respect to primary task completion (Levy et al., 2016).
• researchers demonstrated that exposure to smartphone notifications significantly decreased performance on a concurrent attention-based task, even when the participant did not take the time to view the notification (Stothart et al., 2015).
• A substantial body of work over the past 12 years has considered the effects of texting on driving abilities using driving simulators or closed tracks. Caird et al. (2014) performed a meta-analysis on this literature and concluded that the act of writing text messages impacts nearly every studied measure of dangerous driving. They reported that texting consistently led to decreased attention to the road, slower response time to hazards, greater lateral variance across the lane, and more crashes.
• Research investigating the direct impacts that interruptions can have on performance is complemented by research on “resumption errors” – errors that arise in task performance that is resumed following an interruption or task-switch (Monk, 2004; Cades et al., 2007; Brumby et al., 2013). The tendency to commit resumption errors increases steeply when the interruption duration exceeds 15 s (Monk et al., 2008). Smartphone interruptions frequently exceed this 15 s threshold (Leiva et al., 2012), and therefore may be especially deleterious to the resumption of ongoing tasks.
• The data revealed that those who reported engaging in more media multitasking were also less able to filter environmental distractions (task stimuli that were inessential to the primary task). Additionally, frequent media multitaskers exhibited higher switch-costs in a task-switching paradigm, indicating that they were less able to suppress the activation of task set representations that were no longer relevant to performance (Monsell, 2003).
• For instance, using a shorter form of the Media Use Questionnaire, Moisala et al. (2016) showed that everyday media multitasking is associated with poorer control over attention. Specifically, the participants who had higher MMI scores made significantly more errors on a task measuring their ability to ignore distractors that interfered with task completion. Moreover, Cain and Mitroff (2011) found that the link between distractibility and media multitasking habits was associated specifically with individual differences in the scope of attention [and not differences in working memory; see also Yap and Lim (2013)for related results].
• Though it may seem as if constant access to a limitless database of knowledge should improve cognition, much has been written about how the rapidly changing landscape of technology is negatively affecting how we remember our own lives, the places we have been, and those with whom we have interacted (e.g., Kuhn, 2010; Humphreys and Liao, 2011; Pentzold and Sommer, 2011; Frith and Kalin, 2015; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015). However, as with attentional impact, the body of empirical evidence demonstrating tangible effects of mobile media devices on memory and knowledge is limited.
• This finding, dubbed by the authors as the “Google Effect,” and later referred to by other researchers as “digital amnesia” (Kaspersky Lab, 2015) demonstrates that the expectation of having later access to information can make us less inclined to encode and store that information in long-term memory.
• Barr et al. (2015) recently reported findings from a further exploration of internet access via smartphones and knowledge representation. In keeping with the notion that humans are generally “cognitive misers” (Kahneman, 2011), these authors posited that the tendency to rely on simple heuristics and mental shortcuts extends to the habitual use of internet search engines as a substitute for deep cognitive analysis.
• Another common concern regarding the “offloading” of our semantic memory into a modern technological device regards the impact of GPS mapping systems on our ability to navigate the world. Crafting an accurate cognitive representation of our spatial surroundings is crucial for us to effectively and efficiently get from one place to another. It has been posited that constant reliance on GPS navigation systems, which are now integrated into smartphone devices, interferes with our natural tendency to develop cognitive spatial representations. Media headlines insist that these car technologies are “creating stupid drivers” (Moskvitch, 2014) and there are many compelling instances in which a driver blindly followed an inaccurate GPS direction into peril (Hansen, 2013). As GPS navigation devices pre-exist smartphone technology, so too does the related scientific literature.
• Finally, research extending the Ophir et al. (2009) findings on media multitasking also implicates this behavior in memory functioning. Most recently, Uncapher et al. (2015) showed that frequent media multitaskers differed from light users with respect to their working memory capacity, and also exhibited diminished long-term memory functioning.

Do Smartphones Undermine Short-Term Memory? – Experience life

• “One study found that 44 percent of Americans surveyed reported that their smartphone “serves as their memory,” and nearly half of young people who responded said that losing the data stored on their phones and similar devices would “fill them with sadness, since there are memories . . . that they would never get back.”  Still, those are subjective responses. The objective effects of these devices on our memory are harder to measure, says Evan Risko, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Risko studies “cognitive offloading,” which is what we do when we entrust our memory to an external device, whether it’s a pad of paper or a mobile phone.”

Phones Aren’t Smart People Are Conclusion:

Our smartphones may not be making us  stupid, but they are changing the way we do things. Especially how we engage our minds and our lives.  If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, maybe its time to get away from your phone, computer, laptop and other electronic devices for awhile. Go out and take a hike or explore your city. Visit friends and talk face to face. Read a book, memorize some new information, go to the library, enroll in advanced educations classes or just go out and play. Away from your phone and away from distraction.  Your brain will thank you.