How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds - Part II
(Continues from Part I)
In another study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in April, researchers examined how smartphones affected learning in a lecture class with 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. They found that students who didnt bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didnt matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly. A study of 91 secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.
It isnt just our reasoning that takes a hit when phones are around. Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well. Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when were talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.
(snip)
Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, the art of remembering is the art of thinking. Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
This story has a twist. It turns out that we arent very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though their own mental capacities had generated the information, not their devices. The advent of the information age seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before, the scholars concluded, even though they may know ever less about the world around them.
(snip)
That insight sheds light on our societys current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, youll believe anything it tells you.
Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is memory without history. Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains. When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets wont solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-smartphones-hijack-our-minds-1507307811
msongs
(67,459 posts)question everything
(47,544 posts)in constant need of assurance that they have friends, that some think of them, often afraid to be alone with their own thoughts.
Cartoonist
(7,323 posts)Don't take this personally, but were you looking in a mirror while you wrote that on your device?
I cast my eyes about for a mirror while I wrote this on my smartphone.
That's the sad part of articles like this. It's not about those kids, it's about all of us. It's about everyone here who goes online for whatever reason.
question everything
(47,544 posts)And since we are seniors at home most of the time, the cell phones are not even on most of the time.
As a matter of fact, since so few know our cell phone numbers, when I hear it rings, I don't even bother to check, I know it is a spam with no message left.
And we both love to read, to the "sounds of silence."
Skittles
(153,212 posts)going online is not the problem, LIVING online is