The curse of the ‘smartphone age’: what is digital dementia and how to recognize it in yourself

We increasingly rely on devices for everyday tasks, and today no one remembers numbers of relatives and friends and fixes the shopping list in memory – why, if the phone book and the notes do a great job? On the one hand, it is very convenient because it saves time and energy. On the other hand, we have stopped training our brain and are endangering its performance. Experts have already found a name for this phenomenon and call this process digital dementia.

Chinese-American writer and brain scientist Jim Quick explains this disturbing phenomenon: “At the heart of digital dementia is the idea that smart devices are making us less intelligent ourselves. Gadgets have become a kind of external memory for people, so we don’t use our own memory anymore.

Quick is sure that if the brain is not trained daily, the memory capacity begins to melt away quickly. In addition, screen time itself negatively affects the brain: the more time we spend in front of the computer and with the phone in hand, the greater the risk of early onset of Alzheimer’s disease and “real” dementia is high.

Jim Quick lists such signals: they may be almost invisible, but they are quite disturbing.

Until recently, you had no problem counting in your head while shopping, but now you always open your smartphone calculator? It could be a sign of digital dementia. Cognitive abilities suffer from excessive use of digital devices.

The healthy habit of concentrating on a task suffers from the fact that we are accustomed to being constantly distracted: by correspondence, memes, watching reals, or simply going on the Web to seek the answer to a question that suddenly comes to us. ‘mind. A typical side effect of this type of consumption is that few people today are able to watch a two-hour movie without interruption to consult their smartphone. Familiar?

Do you regularly catch yourself forgetting the words just spoken by the interlocutor, and dates, names and other facts literally pop out of your head in an unknown direction? It can also be the result of overuse of smart device communication – your brain doesn’t bother to store this information because it knows you can read it on your smartphone at any time.

It is assumed that there is a therapy, and in the most general sense, the recipe is this – you need to constantly train the brain. Learn phone numbers, solve arithmetic problems and puzzles. Learning a foreign language is also a great way to create new neural connections and activate the lazy. Sudoku, Wordle are also very useful.

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And most importantly – regular digital detox without cheating. Pay attention to it on a daily basis, so that you don’t become a desperate victim of digital dementia. Read books, watch movies, play sports, walk and socialize – without devices in your hands and in your pocket. We all really need those few hours a day away from smart screens, and increasing that period of “gadget purity” is very important.

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