Fifty years after the first phone call, cell phones are essential tools today. But do they change the functioning of our brain?
Like many of us, I spend too much time on my cell phone. And, like many of us, I am fully aware of this and often feel guilty about it.
Sometimes I leave my phone across the house or turn it off to use it less. But in the end, I end up walking down the aisle sooner than I’d like to admit, doing something I can only do with my cell phone — or that allows me to do it more efficiently.
Do I have to pay a bill? Mobile phone. Making an appointment to have a coffee with a friend? Mobile phone. Sending a message to family who live far away? Mobile phone.
Check the weather forecast, write a story idea, snap a photo, make a video, create a photo album, listen to a podcast, get directions, do a quick calculation… until you turn on the flashlight? Cell, cell and cell.
A recent study found that US adults check their cell phones an average of 344 times a day, once every four minutes. In all, they spend nearly three hours a day on their devices.
The problem for many of us is that rapid activity on our phone leads to a quick check of email or social media. Until, suddenly, you get sucked into the infinite scrolling screen.
It’s a vicious circle. The more useful our cell phones are, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more neural pathways we create in our brains to make us answer the phone for whatever task comes our way, and the more we want to check the phone, even when we don’t need to.
50 years ago, Martin “Marty” Cooper made the first call from a cell phone. He made the device himself: a beige, brick-sized phone that is very different from today’s smartphones, which are thin and covered in glass.
Cooper’s device had no camera and did not send text messages. His battery only allowed for 30 minutes of talk time and it took 10 hours to recharge. Today he doesn’t think of modern smartphones as telephony devices.
“It’s not really a great phone in many ways,” says Cooper. “Think about it. You take a piece of plastic and glass, which is flat, and you place it against the curve of your head. Your hand is in an awkward position.”
Aside from this difficulty and concerns about specific aspects of our hyperconnected world (like social networks, with their increasingly realistic beauty filters), what is our cell phone addiction doing to our brains? Is everything bad or is there a good thing?
“drained” brain.
It’s easy to imagine that with our addiction to devices growing year on year, research is struggling to keep up. What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking your phone or looking at a notification can have negative consequences.
It’s not even something very surprising, but since we know that, in general, running multiple tasks simultaneously impairs our memory and performance.
One of the most dangerous examples is the use of cell phones while driving. One study concluded that the simple act of talking on the phone, without sending text messages, is enough to reduce the reaction speed of motorists on the road.
And this also applies to less risky daily activities. In one study, hearing a simple notification beep caused participants to significantly underperform on a given task. They did nearly as bad as participants who talked or texted on their cell phones while working.
And it’s not just cell phone use that has consequences. Its mere presence can affect the way we think.
In another recent study, researchers asked participants to place their cell phones next to them so that they were visible (on a table, for example), close and out of sight (such as in a purse or pocket), or in another room. Participants then performed a series of tasks to test their ability to process and recall information, concentrate and solve problems.
We found that performance was much better when the phones were in another room and not nearby, whether they were visible or invisible, turned on or off. The same result was also obtained when the majority of participants said they did not consciously think about their devices.
Apparently, the mere proximity of the cell phone contributes to the “brain drain”.
Our brains seem to work hard subconsciously to inhibit the urge to check our cell phone or constantly monitor our surroundings to see if we should pick up the phone, such as when we’re expecting a notification. Either way, this shift in focus can make it difficult to complete any task.
The researchers concluded that the only solution is to place the device in a completely different room.
That’s the bad news, or part of it. But researchers recently concluded that there may also be a silver lining to our cell phone addiction.
It is a common belief, for example, that relying on the phone for everything atrophies our memory capacity. But this may not be such a simple conclusion.
In a recent study, volunteers were given a screen with numbered circles that they had to drag one way or another. The higher the number in the circle, the more volunteers they would get if they moved it right.
Half of the participants were able to write on the screen which circles should go in which direction. The other half had to rely on memory alone.
Naturally, having access to digital memos helped performance. Surprisingly, the participants who used the reminders not only remembered better the annotated circles (those with the highest value), but also the circles that hadn’t been recorded!
The researchers believe that by entrusting the device with the most important information (the circles with the highest value), the participants’ memory was freed up to store information of less value.
The downside was that when the participants no longer had access to the reminders, they persisted in remembering the circles of lower value, but they could no longer remember the higher values.
It will take many years of research before we know exactly what our cellphone addiction is doing to our willpower and long-term cognition. Until then, there is another way to try to reduce its harmful effects. And it has to do with how we think about our brains.
As my former colleague David Robson wrote in his book The expectation effect (“The Expectancy Effect”), recent research has challenged the belief that if we exert our willpower in a certain way (for example, by unconsciously resisting being checked by our cell phone), we “deplete” our overall reserves, which would hinder basically our concentration on other tasks.
That might be true, but Robson writes that a lot depends on what we believe.
Individuals who believe our brains have “limited” resources — that is, who think that resisting one temptation lowers our resistance to the next — are actually more likely to exhibit this phenomenon when studying.
But there are people who think that the more we resist temptation, the more we strengthen our ability to continue resisting — in other words, that our brains have unlimited resources. For them, exercising self-control or mental fatigue in one task does not impair our performance in the next task.
The most fascinating thing is the limited or unlimited view of the brain, to a large extent it can be cultural. And that people from Western countries may be more likely to believe that the mind is limited than people living in other cultures, such as India for example.
But what can we get from all this? Well, to reduce the number of times I check my phone, I’m going to practice leaving it in another room.
But I’ll also remind myself that my brain has more resources than I realize — and that every time I resist the urge to check my cell phone, my brain will create new neural pathways that will make it easier and easier to resist and possibly the next. more temptations in the future.
NOTE: While preparing this report, the author only stopped typing to check his cell phone once and ended up scrolling for about five minutes. Considering how many times he’s thought of cell phones while writing, he considers this index a win.
read the original version of this report (in English) on the website Future of the BBC.
Source: Terra
Ben Stock is a lifestyle journalist and author at Gossipify. He writes about topics such as health, wellness, travel, food and home decor. He provides practical advice and inspiration to improve well-being, keeps readers up to date with latest lifestyle news and trends, known for his engaging writing style, in-depth analysis and unique perspectives.
