How cell phones changed our brains – 04/11/2023 – Equilibrium

Like many of us, I spend far too much time on my cell phone. And, like many of us, I am fully aware and often feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I leave the phone on the other side of the house or turn it off so I can use less. But in the end, I end up walking down the aisle sooner than I’d like to admit, to do something I can only do with my cell phone – or that it allows me to do more efficiently.

Do I need to pay a bill? Cell phone. Make an appointment to have coffee with a friend? Cell phone. Send a message to the family that lives far away? Cell phone.

Check the weather forecast, write down an idea for a story, take 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 concluded that US adults check their cell phones an average of 344 times a day – once every four minutes. In all, they spend almost three hours a day on the devices.

The problem for many of us is that a quick task on our phone leads to a quick check of email or social media. Until, suddenly, you’re sucked into the endlessly 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 get us to pick up the phone for whatever task comes our way – and the more we feel like checking the phone, even when we don’t need to.

50 years ago, Martin “Marty” Cooper made the first call from a mobile phone. He made the device himself – a beige brick-sized phone, 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. Its battery only allowed 30 minutes of talk time – and it took 10 hours to charge. Today, he doesn’t think of modern smartphones as devices for making phone calls.

“It really isn’t a very good 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.”

Leaving aside this difficulty and concerns about specific aspects of our hyperconnected world (such as 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 positive aspect?

‘drained’ brain

It’s easy to imagine that with our reliance on devices growing year after year, research is struggling to keep up. What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking your phone or watching a notification can have negative consequences.

It is not something very surprising either, but since we know that, in general, the simultaneous performance of several tasks 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 drivers on the road.

And this is also true for less risky day-to-day tasks. In one study, listening to a simple notification beep caused participants to significantly underperform on a given task. They did almost as poorly as the 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 how we think.

In another recent study, researchers asked participants to place their cell phones next to them so 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.

It was 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 obtained even when most participants stated that they were not consciously thinking about their devices.

Apparently, the mere proximity of the cell phone contributes to “brain drain”.

Our brain seems 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 — for example, when we expect a notification. Either way, this shift in attention can make it difficult to accomplish any task.

The researchers concluded that the only solution is to place the device in an entirely different room.

This is the bad news, or part of it. But researchers have more recently concluded that there may also be a silver lining to our cell phone addiction.

It’s 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 the other. The higher the number in the circle, the more volunteers would receive if they moved it the right way.

Half of the participants were able to write down on the screen which circles should go which way. The other half had to rely on memory alone.

Of course, having access to digital reminders helped performance. Surprisingly, participants using the reminders not only remembered circles noted (the ones with the highest value) better, but also circles that had not been recorded!

The researchers believe that, by entrusting the most important information (the circles with the highest value) to the device, the participants’ memory was freed to store the information of lesser value.

The downside was that when participants no longer had access to the reminders, the recall of the lower value circles persisted, but they could no longer remember the higher values.

It will take many years of research before we know exactly what our cell phone 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 brain.

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 exercise our willpower in a certain way (for example, subconsciously resisting checking our cell phone), we “deplete” our overall reserves, which would substantially hinder our concentration on other tasks.

That may be true, but Robson writes that a lot depends on what we believe.

Individuals who believe that our brains have “limited” resources — that is, who think that resisting one temptation lowers our resistance to the next one — are actually more likely to exhibit this phenomenon during studies.

But there are people who think that the more we resist temptation, the more we strengthen our ability to keep resisting – in other words, that our brain has unlimited resources. For them, exerting self-control or mental fatigue on a task does not impair our performance on the next task.

The most fascinating thing is the limited or unlimited view of the brain, in large part, 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 out of all this? Well, to cut down on the amount of times I check my phone, I’m going to practice leaving it in another room.

But I will also remind myself that my brain has more resources than I realize – and that whenever I resist the temptation to check my cell phone, my brain will create new neural pathways that will make it easier and easier to resist this one and maybe the next one. other temptations in the future.

NOTE: When preparing this report, the author stopped writing to check her cell phone just once and ended up scrolling for about five minutes. Considering how often she thought about cell phones while writing, she considers this index a win.